SINGAPORE (AFP) - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that Myanmar is “badly out of step” with the world community, even though it ratified a regional charter setting out human rights principles.

Rice attended a ministerial gathering Wednesday of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which spent considerable time on Myanmar, which is under US and EU sanctions over its human rights record.

“The ASEAN charter aspires to rule of law, human rights, development of more pluralistic political systems, integration into the international community of states and Burma is out of step, badly out of step,” she said.

The regional grouping pursues a controversial policy of “constructive engagement” with Myanmar, a military-run nation formerly known as Burma.

The junta was severely criticised for its delay in allowing foreign aid into the country after a May 2-3 cyclone left 138,000 people dead or missing.

It belatedly allowed aid workers to enter under an arrangement forged with ASEAN and the United Nations.

“You wonder how can the international community stand by and allow that to happen,” Rice said.

“I give a lot of credit to ASEAN for developing the mechanism for assistance and for speeding up assistance after a period of time and becoming a kind of an international clearinghouse, if you will, for contact with Burma,” she said.

“That was a useful role, but it should never have happened in the first place,” Rice said.

“Now the question is, given the slight opening that this has provided, is there a way to move Burma to a political track that would finally make something of what is right now a kind of mockery, which is this ‘roadmap to democracy’ which is going nowhere,” Rice said.

“Would it be possible for regional states and neighbors to press the regime to release Aung San Suu Kyi, to allow real opposition, to get on a path?” she said.

Democracy leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past 18 years since her party won a 1990 election which the generals have never recognised.

Ministers repeated a call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and other political detainees, while urging the junta to engage with her movement, which has been shut out of the much-criticised “roadmap to democracy.”

While the ASEAN foreign ministers expressed “deep disappointment” over Aung San Suu Kyi’s continued detention on Sunday night, those words were removed in a final communique issued after formal talks the following day.