A regional approach & systems building: The COMMIT Process’ new Agenda

10 years ago in 2004, the six governments of the Greater Mekong Sub-region countries (Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand & Vietnam) came together to sign a groundbreaking MoU on sub-regional cooperation against human trafficking.

The Process they embarked upon is called the Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative against Trafficking, better known as COMMIT.

To operationalize the MoU, COMMIT has worked on the basis of so-called Sub-regional Plans of Action (SPAs), of which three have been implemented to date. SPAIII is currently in its final year, with a process underway to develop SPAIV that is set to guide COMMIT’s work between 2015 and 2018.

UN-ACT as the Secretariat to the COMMIT Process was requested to develop a zero draft of SPAIV, in cooperation with key regional partners from UN and affiliated agencies as well as civil society. A workshop took place for this purpose in June 2014, with the zero draft subsequently having gone through a series of consultations in each of the six countries involved.

Such national-level consultations involved a broad spectrum of different anti-trafficking stakeholders, including governments, international organizations, donor agencies and civil society stakeholders. The process has been by far the most participatory and inclusive for any COMMIT Sub-regional Plans of Action developed to date.

The discussions and feedback from the consultations informed the further development of SPAIV. The regional COMMIT Taskforce meeting in late October 2014 is expected to agree on the new framework agreement in principle and define regional priorities for action in 2015. This will allow for 2015 COMMIT work planning to be done in the last quarter of 2014, whilst SPAIV is set for official endorsement at the COMMIT Inter-Ministerial Meeting in April 2015.

The SPAIV development process has revealed a need to strengthen the regional dimension of cooperation in COMMIT, and to build sustainable and sustainable systems for cooperation between countries, for the Process to live up to the commitments in the COMMIT MoU.

In practical terms, this can be conceived of as institutionalizing a regional referral and protection mechanism. Such a result would take COMMIT to the forefront in the ASEAN context, where similar processes are being developed at the moment, but without an implementation mechanism such as COMMIT.

With the development of a new, more concise and results-oriented SPAIV, the COMMIT Process has the opportunity to fulfill the potential of its original MoU and set an example of effective regional cooperation against human trafficking more broadly.

UN-ACT is looking forward to working with all our partners in supporting COMMIT to achieve precisely this!