Foreign Ministers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have endorsed the establishment of the ASEAN-China Joint Working Group to study and recommend measures to translate the provisions of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DoC) into concrete cooperative activities.

This was contained in a joint communique issued Tuesday at the end of one-day ASEAN ministerial meeting in Vientiane, Laos.

"We looked forward to the first meeting of the working group on the implementation of DoC to be held in Manila in August 2005, as a concrete step toward the full implementation of the DoC," the ministers said.

The ministers welcomed China's view underscoring that a regional code of conduct in the South China Sea is essential, as conveyed during the 11th ASEAN China Senior Officials Consultations in Shanghai, China, in April 2005.

"We encouraged all parties concerned to continue to exercise of self-restraint and to continue to undertake confidence-building measures that would contribute to the maintenance of peace and stability in the region.”

"We also reaffirmed our commitment to resolve the dispute in the South China Sea through peaceful means in accordance with international conventions including the United Nations Convention on the law of the Sea," the communique said.

ASEAN's annual ministerial meeting was attended by foreign ministers from ten-member bloc which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam and foreign misters from Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste.

Together with the communiqué, the ministerial meeting also obtained other fruitful achievements on a number of commonly concerned international and regional issues.

The annual ministerial meeting agreed to establish ASEAN Development Fund, serving as the bloc's common pool of finance resource to support the implementation of the Vientiane Action Program (VAP) and the ASEAN Community.

Consensus has been reached among the ministers on mapping out ASEAN Charter, a key document with legal binding force to its members. The draft of the charter will be submitted to 11th ASEAN Leadership Summit in Malaysia later this year.

The meeting agreed to streamline and reform the procedures of ASEAN conferences in order to boost effectiveness and reduce expenditure of the organization.

Southeast Asian countries on Tuesday invited Australia, New Zealand and India to attend the inaugural East Asia Summit in Malaysia later this year, aiming for a big regional trade bloc.

Australia and New Zealand this year agreed to sign a nonaggression pact with ASEAN, a precondition for countries wished to attend the summit. India already signed the pact in 2003.

In the wake of the last year's tsunami calamity, ASEAN ministers endorsed the agreement on disaster management and emergency response in bid to respond correctively and expeditiously to national disasters.

New Zealand, Pakistan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) signed the joint declaration on anti-terrorism cooperation with ASEAN. Bangladesh was also acceded as the new member of the Asian Regional Forum (ARF) at Tuesday's meeting.

(Xinhua News Agency July 27, 2005)