ASEAN Summit 2022 and India’s G20 Presidency

The ASEAN

The East Asia Summit (EAS)

• The Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN is a regional inter-governmental organization consisting of 10 Southeast Asian countries -Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• It aims to facilitate and promote cooperation in trade, security, education, and cultural integration and exchange. 
• ASEAN is considered one of the most influential groupings in the region, and India and several other countries, including the US, China, Japan, and Australia, are its dialogue partners.
• It is collectively the third-largest economy in Asia after China and Japan and the seventh-largest in the world.

• The East Asia Summit (EAS) is the Indo-Pacific's premier forum for strategic dialogue.
• It is the only leader-led forum at which all key Indo-Pacific partners meet to discuss political, security, and economic challenges facing the region and have an important role to play in advancing closer regional cooperation.
• The EAS has 18 members - the ten ASEAN countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) along with Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the United States.
• ASEAN leads the forum, and the chair position rotates between ASEAN Member States.

India’s Vice President JagdeepDhankhar has addressed the East Asia Summit.

SHORT NEWS

Supreme Court flags ‘sealed cover’ again, says it is vague, opaque

• Sealed cover jurisprudence is a practice used by the Supreme Court and sometimes lower courts, of asking for or accepting information from government agencies in sealed envelopes that can only be accessed by judges.
• While a specific law does not define the doctrine of sealed cover, the Supreme Court derives its power to use it from Rule 7 of Order XIII of the Supreme Court Rules and Section 123 of the Indian Evidence Act of 1872.

Nine new Countries Join GOWA

• Nine new countries (Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the US) have joined the Global Offshore Wind Alliance (GOWA) at the UN-COP27 climate summit.
• \GOWA was initiated in September 2022 by the
  • International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)
  • Denmark
  • Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC)
• It aims to drive installed global offshore wind capacity up by 670 percent — from 57 GW in 2021 to 380 GW in 2030.
• Offshore wind energy is clean and renewable energy obtained by taking advantage of the force of the wind that is produced on the high seas, where it reaches a higher and more constant speed than on land due to the absence of barriers.

NFRA brings out norms for inspecting audit firms

• The audit regulator, the National Financial Reporting Authority (NFRA), brought out a set of guidelines for monitoring the audit firms’ quality and compliance standards.
• NFRA is a body constituted under the provisions of Section 132 of the Companies Act, 2013.
• The constitution of this authority is effective from 1st October 2018.
• Objective: To continuously improve the quality of all corporate financial reporting in India.