Laws Of South East Asia

This book offers a comparative analysis of traditional Asian legal systems. It combines methods from legal history, legal anthropology, legal philosophy, and substantive law, pursuing a comprehensive approach that offers readers a broad perspective on the topic. The geographic regions covered include the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. For each region, the book first provides historical and political context. Next, it discusses major milestones in the region’s legal history and political institutions, as well as its forms of government. Readers are then presented with fundamental principles and terms needed to understand the legal arguments discussed. The book begins with the Ancient Near East and important topics such as Jewish law. The next part considers Islamic law, while also exploring modern issues. The third part focuses on Hindu and Buddhist law, while the fourth part covers China and Japan. The book’s closing section examines tribal societies, e.g. Mongols, Pashtuns and Malays. Topics covered include the interaction of legal systems within a legal circle, inter-systemic interactions, reasons for the failure and success of legal modernization, legal pluralism, and its effects on Asian societies. Family law, law of obligation, criminal law, and procedural law are also explored.

During the 1980s and 1990s Asian 'developmental states' attracted much attention in political science and economics literature, but the role of law in the economic development was neglected. It was only after the Asian crisis of 1997 that many analysts began to focus on a lack of regulation and transparency as a major factor triggering the crisis. The crucial questions now are how successful the current reforms will be, and which features of the Asian approach to commercial law will be resistant to reform pressures. This book examines the prospects for commercial law reform in Asia, giving particular attention to Japan and Singapore, as frequently cited role models for Asian developmentalism, and also examining development related business laws in countries such as China, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

This collection of essays focuses on law and the diaspora Chinese. They show us a variety of answers to such questions as: what are the laws of China outside China; what are the laws of the Chinese in Southeast Asia; what were/are the laws for the Chinese in Southeast Asia; and is there a "Confucian Chinese"? The answers in some cases are reasonably certain but in others they are tentative and debatable. The legal material raises these issues in a way which is fundamental to diaspora studies.

Since the passage of the ASEAN Charter in 2008, ASEAN has transformed itself from a loose economic cooperation, into a formal intergovernmental organization designed to create an “ASEAN Community” forged together in three pillar communities – the ASEAN Political-Security Community, ASEAN Economic Community, and tASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. Forty years of pre-Charter ASEAN practices, coupled with over ten years of post-Charter ASEAN practices thus far, has witnessed the conclusion of hundreds of legally binding regional treaties and similarly binding international instruments in all areas of economic, political-security, and socio-cultural concerns for Southeast Asia to achieve ASEAN’s rule of law-based development objective. Pre-Charter and post-Charter ASEAN Law is variably implemented under a hybrid governance system that depends heavily on ASEAN Member State national implementation alongside ASEAN’s evolving regional institutions. The result is not a model of deep integration as in the case of the European Union, but a particular paradigm of horizontal embeddedness of ASEAN Law – in all its norms and operational practices – contingent on the capacities and compliance of national government bureaucracies in Southeast Asia. This edited collection is a concise authoritative volume covering the practical, doctrinal, legal, and policy aspects of the new regime of ASEAN Law and its consequences for realizing rule of law-based development in Southeast Asia’s emerging single market and production base. Drawing together contributions from a range of key thinkers in the field, the editors present the legal and policy-making issues implicated in the practical implementation of Southeast Asia’s single market and its regime for the free movement of goods, services, foreign investment, and cross-border labor. The book also examines the nature of regional law-making under ASEAN before and after the commencement of regional integration in 2015, the nature of ASEAN’s economic regulators, as well as the evolving structure for enforcement and harmonization of “ASEAN Law” through the array of Southeast Asian national courts, arbitral tribunals, and incipient mechanisms for inter-State, intra-regional, and individual-State conflict management and dispute resolution. This book is highly relevant to students, scholars, and policy-makers with an interest in ASEAN Law and regional policy, and to Southeast Asian studies in general.

This book proposes a selective approach for states with more advanced human rights protection to establish a human rights court for Southeast Asia. It argues the inclusive approach currently employed by ASEAN to set up a human rights body covering all member states cannot produce a strong regional human rights mechanism. The mosaic of Southeast Asia reveals great diversity and high complexity in political regimes, human rights practice and participation by regional states in the global legal human rights framework. Cooperation among ASEAN members to protect and promote human rights remains limited. The time-honored principle of non-interference and the “ASEAN Way” still predominate in relations within ASEAN. These factors combine to explain why the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights is unlikely to be strong and effective in changing and promoting regional human rights protection. This book suggests a selective approach to establish a human rights court for Southeast Asia. It posits that a group of nations within Southeast Asia may be more willing to consider the possibility of a stronger human rights mechanism. It investigates the challenges to and the feasibility of such a proposal. Furthermore, it examines the design of the three existing regional human rights courts in Europe, the Americas, and Africa, and compares the rationales for those institutional designs with the specific context of Southeast Asia. A human rights court for all ASEAN members may not be possible at this time, but a court for some nations in the region is feasible and worth exploring. The path towards this goal is never an easy one; however, the region possesses the necessary conditions to gradually translate that goal into reality.

An interdisciplinary work on regional integration and the rule of law in ASEAN and the emergence of a soft regulatory regime.

This wide-ranging, geographically ambitious book tells the story of the Arab diaspora within the context of British and Dutch colonialism, unpacking the community's ambiguous embrace of European colonial authority in Southeast Asia. In Fluid Jurisdictions, Nurfadzilah Yahaya looks at colonial legal infrastructure and discusses how it impacted, and was impacted by, Islam and ethnicity. But more important, she follows the actors who used this framework to advance their particular interests. Yahaya explains why Arab minorities in the region helped to fuel the entrenchment of European colonial legalities: their itinerant lives made institutional records necessary. Securely stored in centralized repositories, such records could be presented as evidence in legal disputes. To ensure accountability down the line, Arab merchants valued notarial attestation land deeds, inheritance papers, and marriage certificates by recognized state officials. Colonial subjects continually played one jurisdiction against another, sometimes preferring that colonial legal authorities administer Islamic law—even against fellow Muslims. Fluid Jurisdictions draws on lively material from multiple international archives to demonstrate the interplay between colonial projections of order and their realities, Arab navigation of legally plural systems in Southeast Asia and beyond, and the fraught and deeply human struggles that played out between family, religious, contract, and commercial legal orders.

An analysis of debates and mechanisms of international criminal law in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Myanmar.