In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Asia-Pacific

07 Dec

The WTO's new Director-General Roberto Azevedo is celebrating a rare event:  The WTO's entire 159-country membership has finally reached  a new multilateral agreement.  This is the first time that the WTO's membership as a whole (as opposed to smaller groups of its member states) has reached an agreement since it was formed in 1994 and the first set of agreements under...

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24 Nov

I don't have any insights to offer on the big news this weekend, that legally-non binding-UNSC-resolution-violating agreement in Geneva.  But I did want to note one other big sort-of-law news item from the other side of the world: China's announcement that it is drawing an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, including over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku...

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20 Nov

[This Post has been updated]. One of the main benefits of attending a conference (rather than just reading descriptions of its proceedings), is the chance to have face-to-face exchanges with individuals you normally never get a chance to meet.  One of the unusual aspects of the Asian Society of International Law is that it draws lawyers from many different Asian...

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15 Oct

China's U.N. Ambassador made a typically anodyne statement recently to the U.N. General Assembly on the Rule of Law at National and International Levels. But there are a few interesting nuggets worth noting that reflect China's skeptical attitude toward international adjudication. Anyone who follows the Chinese government's diplomatic statements will know that it repeatedly stresses the U.N. Charter's obligation on states to seek...

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12 Sep

Andrew Cayley, the co-international prosecutor, has resigned effective next week: British national Andrew Cayley told VOA that it was no secret he was planning to resign this year, but said he was leaving now for personal and professional reasons. He did not elaborate and said his resignation will not affect the ongoing prosecutions under his authority. Cayley’s departure, which is effective September...

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22 Aug

[Margaret K. Lewis is Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School] The current trial of former high-ranking official Bo Xilai has shined the international spotlight on China’s criminal justice system. Headlines are simultaneously emphasizing the Chinese leadership’s concern that its rule is “vulnerable to an economic slowdown” after China’s meteoric rise to become the world’s second largest economy in terms of nominal GDP. What is lacking in both the media and academic literature is an in-depth discussion of the role criminal law has played in China’s stunning economic growth to date as well as the role it might play in the future. This inquiry is particularly timely on the heels of a once-a-decade leadership transition and as China’s ability to maintain a robust growth rate is facing rising skepticism. As explained in more detail in my article here, not only has the PRC leadership historically used criminal law in service of economic ends but also, going forward, criminal law will likely play a multifaceted role in the leadership’s strategy to sustain growth during what promise to be turbulent times. The debate about the role of law in China’s development has thus far largely focused on the Washington Consensus’s support for a market economy’s need for clear and enforceable contract and property rights, often referred to as the “rights hypothesis.” The law and development literature’s emphasis on empowering private actors by creating a neutral bureaucracy subject to objective judicial review has shifted the debate from the most basic function of law: creating order. And creating order starts with the coercive power of the state exercised through criminal law. Not only is criminal law a direct way for the government to deprive people of money, liberty, and life, it is cheaper and faster than building the civil and administrative law systems on which the rights hypothesis relies. If a these systems are not credible enough to deter activities that are detrimental to economic growth, the government can invoke the heavy hand of criminal law.
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17 Jul

[Daniel Seah is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.] Has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) finally had its own post-ontological moment?  No longer are we condemned to participate in the banality of questioning ASEAN’s legal existence as an international organization (IO). After all, since 2008, its international legal personality was expressly conferred in Article 3 of the ASEAN Charter, a constituent treaty.  Now is the time to ask a more useful question: what are the legal consequences that flow from ASEAN exercising its international legal personality? Nowhere is an answer to this question more clearly thrown into relief than in the conferral of competences by member States upon ASEAN, which is the focus of this post. IOs are not created equal; there is a great variety in their functions and objectives. Establishing the objective international legal personalities in these IOs is the easy bit. More difficult are the issues that bear on how the legal personality has been exercised by an IO; and what legal consequences arise for the IO and its member States, as separate legal persons. Because an IO at international law is a legal person, it (or its bodies) can act on behalf of member States although some of these acts are not expressly conferred in the constituent treaty - I call these “implied conferrals”. The word “conferral” is not a legal term of art. It had been variously defined as “capacities” (CF Amerasinghe) to indicate the consequences of international legal personality; “international delegations” (Curtis Bradley & Judith Kelley) to explain a range of legal (and non-legal) decision-making exercised by IOs; or “competences” on which the European Union (EU) is authorised to act in particular areas such as the common commercial policy. In this post, I instance the early practice of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) as an example of implied conferrals.
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13 Jun

The tendency in the United States is to think about cyberthreats exclusively in terms of US interests (a tendency I've certainly followed on more than one occasion).  Hence, the extended attention to questions of whether and how Congress should regulate cybersecurity.  But, of course, cyberspace -- and cyberthreats -- are global.  Every nation is now faced with developing a strategy...

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