Mr. Le Luong Minh, a former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam, assumed the post of Secretary General of the ASEAN in a ceremony for the Transfer of Office at the ASEAN Secretariat Building in Jakarta on January 9, 2013. The ceremony was witnessed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, Dr. Marty Natalegawa, and the outgoing Secretary General of the ASEAN, Dr. Surin Pitsuwan. The ceremony were attended by ambassadors from the Committee of Permanent Representative, ambassadors from missions to ASEAN as well as to Indonesia, representatives from the Diplomatic Corps, international organizations, academics, business community as well as media.

The office tenure of Mr. Minh will be from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2017. His appointment was formally endorsed by the ASEAN Leaders at the 21st ASEAN Summit in Cambodia in November 2012. In his inauguration speech, he emphasized that the next five years will be an exciting and critical one. He mentioned also that he and all the staff in ASEAN Secretariat are prepared to work closely with ASEAN Member States to ensure the major commitments and objectives of the ASEAN Secretariat’s work. According to him, major aims of his new assignment as ASEAN Secretary General are as following:

• To achieve stability and political consent in the relations between ASEAN Member States, the People’s Republic of China and further nations with interests in the Asia Pacific Region.
• To secure economic prosperity for all ASEAN Member States supported by a free flow of economic goods, not hampered by tariff barriers. Related to that, he intends to harmonize differences by the realization of ASEAN as an economic community in the year 2015.
• To develop the socio-cultural pillar of the ASEAN association especially in the field of human rights supported by a specific body already established through ASEAN.

Mr. Minh had a long career in Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which began in 1975. In 1995, he was appointed as Ambassador-Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office and Other International Organizations in Geneva. Two years later, he served as Ambassador-Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Long before the official announcement of his nomination had been endorsed, Mr. Minh attended several key ASEAN meetings, including the annual ministerial meeting in July last year, to acquaint himself with the issues of ASEAN. His focus was on sessions discussing the South China Sea disputes, the East Asia Summit’s foreign ministerial meeting and the ASEAN Regional Forum.