September 17, 2015, H.E. Francisco Fontan Pardo presented his Letter of Credence – as Ambassador of the European Union (EU) to ASEAN – to the Secretary General of ASEAN, H.E. Le Luong Minh in Jakarta.
Ambassador Fontan Pardo will be heading the EU Mission to ASEAN, a newly created Mission exclusively dedicated to strengthen EU-ASEAN relations. Throughout his career in the fields of humanitarian affairs, development cooperation and diplomacy, Ambassador Fontan Pardo has served at the European Commission and the European External Action Service Headquarters, as well as in several EU diplomatic missions in Africa, Asia and Latin America, including two ASEAN countries: Vietnam as Deputy Head of Cooperation, and Indonesia, as Head of the Europe House in Banda Aceh, after the 2004 Tsunami reconstruction and peace processes. Before this assignment, Ambassador Fontan Pardo was the Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to the Federative Republic of Brasil.
Commenting after today’s presentation ceremony, Ambassador Fontan Pardo said: “The EU and ASEAN share in their DNA the same drive for peace and prosperity through close cooperation of its members, placing its people at the center and remaining open to the world. We are already crucial partners economically, and our shared ambition is to further deepen our overall relationship with a particular focus on the political and security areas, towards a truly strategic Partnership in the years to come”.
The EU and ASEAN have been working hard to transform its relationship in a political sense, while opening new avenues for cooperation in area such as: maritime security cooperation, trans-national threats, crisis response, mediation and reconciliation, human rights and rule of law. In Brunei in 2012, EU and ASEAN Ministers agreed to bring the partnership to a higher level by adopting a Plan of Action with more than 90 agreed actions in three areas: political and security; trade and economic; and socio-cultural, thus matching ASEAN’s three pillars or Communities. EU remains strongly committed to further support ASEAN community building process before and post-2015 milestone as well as to share with ASEAN lessons learnt from its own integration process.
ASEAN as a whole represents the EU’s third largest trading partner outside Europe (after US and China) with € 206 billion of trade in goods and services in 2011. The EU is ASEAN second largest trading partner (after China), accounting for around 11% of ASEAN trade.
The EU is also a major development partner for several ASEAN countries (over € 2 billion for the new cycle), an important cooperation partner for ASEAN Connectivity (support will more than double to up to € 200 million for the next cooperation phase) and the largest contributor to the ASEAN Secretariat.
original article: European Union in Indonesia