In considering the articles in this Special Issue, I am struck by the importance of a set of factors that, in my view, both run through the articles like a leitmotif, as well as shape the major ‘take away’ lesson(s) from the articles. In this short commentary, I elaborate on these factors and the lesson(s) to take from them through five ‘Cs’: context; complexity; contestation; the framework of constitutions; and the role of comparative law. The first three ‘Cs’ are lessons from the case studies of the articles themselves, while the second two ‘Cs’ are offered as lessons to help take the dialogue forward. Fundamentally, these five ‘Cs’ highlight the importance of the articles in this Special Issue and the conference from which they emerged on the one hand, while on the other hand, also making us aware of what are the limits of what we should conclude from the individual articles. In other words, taken together, the five ‘Cs’ are, one might say, lessons about lessons.

The increasing integration of regional markets in Southeast Asia has led to the need for a regional framework for financial consumer protection. Access to affordable redress mechanisms is essential for consumer confidence in ASEAN’s burgeoning regional financial markets. Drawing on established channels of regional cooperation among ASEAN Member States, this article proposes a framework based on international best practices and existing financial consumer dispute resolution mechanisms in ASEAN 5 countries. It explores the need for cross-border cooperation to facilitate the effective resolution of financial consumer disputes arising from cross-border transactions. Key proposals include requiring ASEAN CIS passport operators to submit to the jurisdiction of host country financial consumer alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. The ASEAN Committee on Consumer Protection, with its contact points in each Member State and website on available consumer redress mechanisms across ASEAN, provides a platform for the strengthening of cross-border cooperation and facilitating financial consumer access to affordable redress in cross-border transactions.

This article offers a critical analysis of the human rights system established by ASEAN. It first investigates concrete evidence of the system’s ineffectiveness by comparing the cases of Myanmar and Thailand, which illustrate ASEAN’s failure to address human rights violations both before and after the creation of the ASEAN system. It then examines the substantive and procedural limitations of the ASEAN human rights instruments and mechanisms. Specifically, while restrictions on rights and freedoms contained in the instruments undermine the universality of human rights, ASEAN’s mechanisms lack independence and offer only weak protection mandates to address rights violations. In addition, the absence of a judicial body to hear complaints and issue binding remedies makes the system incomplete. The article recommends the creation of an ASEAN court of human rights and suggests changes to the existing instruments and mechanisms that might accommodate the new court.

This article discusses the state of socio-legal scholarship on Southeast Asia and situates the special journal issue in relation to its key patterns, emerging trends, and future directions. Southeast Asian literature in leading socio-legal journals exhibits an imbalanced geographical coverage and tends to cluster around research on state law’s intersection with Islamic and/or customary norms, women’s equality and legal status, and land and the natural environment. These prevailing patterns lead to uneven attention paid to Southeast Asia. However, growing bodies of work along the major themes of legal pluralism, law and development, and dispute processing show the potential of Southeast Asian research to advance important debates and sub-fields in the scholarship at large. Proposals from a December 2012 workshop initiative further identified research directions that could enrich this field of study as well as understandings of law-society relations in Southeast Asia.

Over the past three decades, Transnational Production Regimes (TPRs) have become the main source of technical and regulatory knowledge for Southeast Asia corporations. Typically TPRs transfer knowledge from lead firms located in the industrial North to supplier firms located in Southeast Asia. Regulatory knowledge transferred through TPRs largely bypasses Southeast Asian laws and legal institutions to directly influence the behavior of supplier firms. Although socio-economic studies show that TPRs are responsible for generating much wealth creation in the region, they hardly register in the socio-legal literature. Drawing on ethnographic studies conducted in Vietnam, this paper will attempt to explain why different types of TPRs produce different regulatory responses in Vietnamese firms. Preliminary findings suggest differences in the way that regulatory knowledge transmitted through Northeast Asian and Euro-American TPRs is absorbed and integrated into the organisational fabric of Vietnamese firms. They also shed light on two well-documented phenomena in Vietnam. In conclusion the paper will argue that TPRs displace state commercial laws and are partially responsible for the slow progress of conventional law and development projects in changing regulatory practices. It will contend that the different kinds of TPRs generate regulatory pluralism and the uneven application of state law in different business sectors.

The late 19th century saw the spread of anti-homosexual criminal laws to British colonies. The iconic example was the Indian Penal Code of 1860, with its prohibition of ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature,’ a rewriting of the anti-Catholic ‘buggery’ law of 1534. The language of 377 travelled around the British colonial world. France and certain other parts of Europe had decriminalized homosexual acts a century earlier, so the colonial powers of Europe spoke with different voices. Modern decriminalization is largely the product of the human rights era - sixty years since the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Under GATS, Mode I involves the supply of a service from the territory of one Member into the territory of any other Member. Few negotiators of the Uruguay Round would have imagined the significance that this mode has come to acquire, or that on-line gambling service would flourish so much as to raise a dispute between Members of the WTO. As the first precedent on Mode I of GATS, “US-Measures Affecting the Cross-Border Supply of Gambling and Betting Services” contains important suggestive interpretations of Members' Schedules as well as general exceptions of the GATS, including burden of proof. The authors review the reports of the Panel and Appellate Body, and explore the implications of the case beyond GATS.

This article starts off by providing an overview of the historical and structural aspects of legal education in selected representative jurisdictions in Asia. It then proceeds to tackle what the authors feel to be the most serious challenges faced by Asian law schools today - the need to balance legal education and inter-disciplinary perspectives, to provide sufficient comparative material, to reform teaching and assessment methodology, and to juggle competing needs with very limited resources.

The idea of “human dignity” is accorded a prominent status in domestic constitutions and international human rights law. Its symbolism as a universal ground of human rights sits awkwardly with the absence of a precise definition. The concept has evolved over history and has been interpreted in various ways by people holding different worldviews. The elusive nature of human dignity creates challenges when it is evaluated across cultures. Despite its common association with the concept of liberal democracy, the idea of human worthiness is not necessarily absent in Asian societies, many of which function under alternative political systems.

A cross-cultural perspective requires putting aside ethnocentrism and exploring the convergence of views from different belief systems. Examples from Confucianism and Islam may provide insights on how human dignity is understood and realized in various Asian contexts.

Since 11 September 2001, international law and the community it governs are at a crossroads. While the world appears to be besieged by terrorist threats from non-state actors such as the Al-Qaeda, there is also a substantial risk of super-power unilateralism and arrogance. Amidst these crises, South-Asia occupies a sensitive and vulnerable position. The region is also beset with ethnic, religious, and domestic political conflicts which provide substantial threats to regional peace and security. Against the backdrop of the enormous complications faced by South Asia, the present article considers the role of international and regional institutions in developing forums for establishing peace and security for the region, as well greater promotion of human rights. A particular focus is upon the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) which, it is contended, is an organisation capable of providing a suitable platform for peaceful dialogue within South-Asia.

This paper examines the relationship between three religio-legal traditions and their interactions and responses to the concept of gender equality as reflected in their inheritance practices. Specifically, questions of accommodation and authenticity will be explored through the Hindu, Confucian and Islamic traditions as they exist in contemporary India, Singapore and Hong Kong. While the primary focus will be on the current state of law and practice, the paper will begin personal laws during the period of British colonization. The impact of British jurisprudence will be recounted as background to understanding the contemporary state of the three traditions. For India and Singapore this history will include the impact of their independence movements on their personal laws. Hong Kong's history will include the impact of the territory's return to China.

Preferential trading exchanges have been a very common phenomenon in today's world. FTAs and RTAs are growing so fast that many academics are arguing that they are creating obstacles towards WTO's multilateral trade liberalization. Although seven nations in the South Asian region have recently executed an FTA, the progress of regional cooperation in this region is rather dismal. The purpose of this paper is to analyze SAFTA and discuss the prospect of more meaningful cooperation within the SAARC.

Amidst the understandable enthusiasm for enlarging the traditional state-centred view of security and embracing a “human security” agenda, little scholarly attention has been paid to the implications of this shift for international law. This article first charts the scope and genesis of “human security,” including within the United Nations and in the Asia-Pacific region, and traces the views of key Asian governments on the concept. It then analyses the relationship between human security and human rights and highlights the likely adverse impacts on human rights law. The remainder of the article considers how the human security agenda may destabilize the constitutional distribution of powers among UN organs under the UN Charter, especially by transferring power away from the more participatory General Assembly and towards the less representative and less accountable Security Council. In line with the position of some Asian States, this article reasserts that UN organs other than the Security Council, along with other major international institutions, are the appropriate bodies within which to pursue and address human security issues. In particular, the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council require revitalization to avoid the trap of securitizing issues that are better framed as developmental and social concerns.

This paper will deal with the need to understand Islamic Law in the context of a number of prevailing misconceptions about it. It then discusses the place and importance of Islamic Law in the LL.B. (Bachelor of Law) programmes in Malaysia and elsewhere in Asia. The focus will be on what courses are to be taught, and how they are to be taught. The paper also attempts to shed some light on the possible ways to harmonise Islamic Law with concurrent secular (or civil) law, and offers a vision of the future of Islamic legal education.