Secretary-General of ASEAN
position of ASEAN
The Secretary-General of ASEAN is the chief administrative officer and principal representative of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Established by the 1976 Agreement on the Establishment of the ASEAN Secretariat and formally codified in the ASEAN Charter of 2008, the Secretary-General leads the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia, and is responsible for facilitating and monitoring the implementation of ASEAN agreements and decisions. Appointed by member states during an ASEAN Summit for a single non-renewable five-year term, the Secretary-General acts as a neutral regional official, supporting consensus-building among member states and representing ASEAN in external relations. The secretary-general must come from an ASEAN member state and will be appointed during the ASEAN Summit based on the alphabetical order of member states. The term of office is five years.
History
Pre-2008
The office was first created by the 1976 Agreement on the Establishment of the ASEAN Secretariat, which established a permanent ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta headed by a Secretary-General. Under the1976 agreement, the Secretary-General (then titled Secretary-General of the ASEAN Secretariat) was appointed by the ASEAN Foreign Ministers on a rotating basis and had a two-year term. This laid the initial legal groundwork for the role.
Post-2008
Subsequently, the ASEAN Charter (signed in 2007, in force 2008) elevated and codified the office of Secretary-General of ASEAN as a key ASEAN organ. Article 11 of the ASEAN Charter provides the primary legal basis for the position, detailing its appointment, mandate, and institutional protections.
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This entry incorporates text from “Secretary-General of ASEAN” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.