Legal scholars in China generally refrain from criticizing official policies in public. Qin (Sky) Ma writes that scholars’ response to the feared shutdown of the China Judgments Online (中国裁判文书网) at the end of 2023 was a noteworthy deviation from the norm. It showed that the space for critical discourse, though constrained, is not entirely closed and that strategic engagement by scholars can have impact.
Tamar Groswald Ozery argues that risks to investors may actually be worsened by US enforcement of the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which was enacted in the name of investor protection. Ozery describes the HFCA as part of a geopolitical agenda of decoupling, but says it is backfiring by enhancing the Chinese government’s control over Chinese issuers.
Following the recent Chinese balloon incident, both Washington and Beijing would do well to recall lessons from a failed CIA espionage mission in China 70 years ago, says Jerome A. Cohen. US refusal to acknowledge the CIA’s role resulted in its own agent, John T. Downey, spending almost 21 years in a Chinese prison. The most obvious lesson: how counterproductive it is for governments to engage in lying.
Rangita de Silva de Alwis, who joined the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in January 2023, shares her vision for future development of the jurisprudence of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.
China’s National People’s Congress has just approved an ambitious new Ecological and Environmental Code (生态环境法典) to unify and update the country’s previously fragmented ecological and environmental governance framework. USALI visiting scholar Feng Ge assesses the achievements of codification, but notes that the Code weakens the ability of civil society organizations to help enforce the law through environmental public interest litigation.
Japan’s overseas generosity in the form of aid has been a big part of its positive global image. It led the world in ODA for the entire 1990s in terms of total amount. But Hiroaki Shiga warns that Japan is increasingly using its aid program to counter China’s growing geopolitical influence, and in the process is adopting some negative features of Beijing’s approach.
Eight years since its founding, the China International Commercial Court does not (at least not yet) loom large in the competitive landscape of international commercial courts. Older courts in London, Singapore, and Dubai handle much larger caseloads each year. But Susan Finder writes that the CICC is a work in progress, and tracking its development can yield insights about the ambitions of China’s judiciary.
In 2023, the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal delivered a landmark judgment in Sham Tsz Kit v. Secretary for Justice, giving the Hong Kong government two years to provide an alternative legal framework to recognize same-sex partnerships. The court’s deadline has passed with no such legal framework in place. Preston Cheung and Venisa Wai write that what the government does next will send an important signal about the future of Hong Kong’s constitutional order and the authority of the Court of Final Appeal in deciding constitutional questions.
South Korea is carrying out one of the most far-reaching reforms of its modern legal history. It is abolishing the powerful 78-year-old Prosecutors’ Office and separating the roles of investigator and prosecutor in an effort to curb abuses and restore public trust. Jaewoong Yoon analyzes why the shakeup is deemed necessary, why it has been so long in coming, and the challenges ahead.
The US retreat from its longstanding role as a champion of free trade has created new vulnerabilities for its longtime partners. But for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN, there may be silver linings. Tan Hsien-Li writes that ASEAN is doubling down on its commitment to a rules-based international order, pursuing new trade agreements and taking steps to fulfill its vision of a resilient single market and production base.