Southeast Asian countries are taking long-overdue steps towards standardising laws against terrorism and cross-border crimes. The measures will be difficult to put into place and enforce, but all efforts must be made to make the region safer.
Porous borders, especially between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines and Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, have fostered extensive criminal activity. Extremist groups and criminal networks have flourished and made drug trafficking, money laundering, kidnapping and piracy widespread.
Since the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, it has become clear that controls need to be implemented and co-ordinated.
Police and officials of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations decided at a meeting in Kuala Lumpur this week to make their criminal codes more alike and to share information on crimes and criminal activity.
Efficiency and will are the catch-words but whether some Asean countries have the resources and resolve is questionable.
This is especially true in the 'Golden triangle' region of northern Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, where heroin and synthetic drugs are flooding out at increasing rates.
