Myanmar regime excluded from 49th ASEAN Summit despite Min Aung Hlaing’s diplomatic push

The Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) stated on Wednesday that a representative from Myanmar’s ASEAN Affairs Department will attend the 49th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Manila, Philippines, from Nov. 15-17 as senior regime officials have been barred since 2021 following the military coup.

“Myanmar will be represented by the Director-General of the ASEAN Affairs Department of its Foreign Ministry,” stated the DFA press release on Nov. 11. Han Win Aung, the regime’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Director General of the ASEAN Affairs Department, attended the 38th ASEAN-United States Dialogue at the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, Indonesia, on June 3.

This DFA announcement follows a joint statement by ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) and the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), which demanded that ASEAN 2026 Chair the Philippines should state publicly that it will not invite “accused war criminal Min Aung Hlaing” to Manila. 

“Given ASEAN’s mounting political and moral failures on Myanmar, Min Aung Hlaing’s attendance at the Summit would mark a total capitulation,” stated Yanghee Lee, a SAC-M founding member, in a Nov. 9 press release. “It would be a permanent stain on ASEAN,” the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar added.

The joint statement added that the Myanmar military continued attacks against civilians by carrying out airstrikes during and after ASEAN Chair 2026 Special Envoy Theresa Lazaro’s three-day humanitarian visit to the country from Oct. 28-30. 

In August, the regime’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed the need for a new Special Envoy on Myanmar when Singapore assumes the ASEAN Chair in 2027.

SAC-M and APHR jointly called on ASEAN to set “punitive measures” against the regime in Naypyidaw for not implementing its Five-Point Consensus, which is a peace plan for Myanmar agreed to by Min Aung Hlaing but not implemented upon his return to the country in April 2021.

Since October 2021, ASEAN has barred Min Aung Hlaing and his senior regime officials from attending high-level summits and meetings due to the lack of progress on the peace plan.

On July 31, Min Aung Hlaing publicly dismissed the five points stating it wasn’t the “consensus” of the other 10 ASEAN member states. 

Since being inaugurated as Myanmar’s president on April 10, Min Aung Hlaing has visited the capitals of Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia. The prime ministers of both Thailand and Malaysia have publicly supported Myanmar’s full re-integration into ASEAN. 

SAC-M and APHR urged the current and future ASEAN Chairs, the Philippines and Singapore, to start engagements with the regime’s opponents led by the Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF), which is Myanmar’s premier resistance coalition.