Promoting Rule of Law and Human Rights in Asia
The U.S.-Asia Law Institute serves as a bridge between Asia and America, fostering mutual understanding on legal issues and using constructive engagement to advocate for legal progress.
New and Notable
The deep partisan divisions rending Taiwan's government are no secret. Legislative push-back to President Lai Ching-te’s budgets has received international attention. Yinn-Ching Lu writes that much less attention has been paid both abroad and within Taiwan to a different manifestation of the power struggle between the branches: near-paralysis of the government appointment process. Critical institutions’ leadership ranks are being decapitated by the legislature’s refusal to approve presidential nominees, a phenomenon that Lu says may ultimately be more damaging to Taiwan’s democracy.
The chairwoman of Taiwan’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party, Cheng Li-wun, has a message for Americans: Taiwan should not be the next Ukraine. Rather, Taiwan should reconcile with China and seek to carve out some kind of autonomy within “the great Chinese nation.” Katherine Wilhelm writes that most of Taiwan’s 23 million people do not identify as Chinese, but they are deeply divided over whether the best way to preserve their way of life is befriending China or arming against China.
Few people outside of China’s legal elites have heard of the “foreign-related rule of law” policy. Yet this awkwardly named policy was a big reason that Chinese President Xi Jinping was able to stage his recent summit with US President Donald Trump in a posture of apparent parity. Katherine Wilhelm writes that “foreign-related rule of law” produced the critical minerals export control regime that enabled Xi to force Trump into a tariff truce.
June 21 – June 27
China's Justice Ministry defends the extra-territorial jurisdiction clause in the new ethnic unity law; Hong Kong's national security police arrest a former pro-democracy councilor for allegedly selling seditious books at her bookstore; Japan's House of Representatives approves a bill that would require social media platforms to counter misinformation during election campaigns; a South Korean court sentences a former justice minister to prison for taking steps to detain political figures during the brief 2024 declaration of martial law; a deputy commissioner of Taiwan’s National Human Rights Commission urges the legislature to separate the body from the Control Yuan because the Control Yuan may soon become inoperative.
June 14 – June 20
China releases a white paper operationalizing President Xi Jinping's Global Governance Initiative, a framework to reorder the international system around the United Nations and multilateralism; Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal upholds a a law criminalizing public calls to cast blank ballots or boycott the polls; Japan’s Nagoya High Court agrees with fifteen other high courts that vote-weight disparities in the February election for the House of Representatives did not violate the constitutional principle of electoral equality; South Korean politicians discuss reforming the National Election Commission after it ran short of ballots in the June 3 local elections; Taiwan President Lai Ching-te expresses “high hopes” that US President Trump will approve US$14 billion in new arms sales to Taiwan.
June 07 – June 13
China’s Coast Guard begins questioning merchant ships east of Taiwan to assert its jurisdiction after Japan and the Philippines announce plans to talk about their maritime boundaries; Hong Kong gives its chief executive sole power to designate any criminal case a national security case, automatically reducing the defendant’s procedural protections; Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party again tries to reduce the number of seats in the Diet to reflect the country’s shrinking population; South Korean police and prosecutors raid offices of the National Election Commission to investigate ballot shortages that disrupted local elections on June 3; the chairwoman of Taiwan's Nationalist Party brings her message of reconciliation between Taiwan and China to the United States.
Program on International Law & Relations in Asia
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