The European Union and its Asian partner countries agreed in principle at a recent meeting in Jakarta to hold the planned Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit in Hanoi in October despite the unresolved dispute over the participation of Myanmar and new EU members and senior Dutch politician Hans van den Broek has been dispatched to arrange the difficult terms of this accord.

Following nearly a decade on the sidelines, civil society organisations and representatives from throughout Asia and Europe are demonstrating impatience to assume more of a central role in the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) process, which at the governmental level is acknowledged to be in need of “revitalising and substantiating.”

In a move coinciding with a crucial meeting in Ireland in April 17 that could have decided the attitude of Europe and Asia toward the country, the Myanmar leadership approved the re-opening of the opposition National League for Democracy’s headquarters in Yangon, apparently as part of the “Road Map” to democracy presented by the military government in 2003.

Although dominated by their long-standing stalemate over the need to maintain pressure in the Government in Burma/Myanmar to speed up the pace of democratic and human rights reforms, the meeting of Asian and European Foreign Minister in Ireland April 17-18 also touched on the broad range of issues on the ASEM agenda.