Japan’s Grand Strategy for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific

Author(s):  
Narushige Michishita

There are two major objectives in Japan’s grand strategy: to maintain the balance of power in the face of a rising China, and to bring about economic prosperity, peace, and stability in the Indo-Pacific region. To achieve these objectives, Japan is strengthening its defense capabilities, security ties with the United States, and security partnerships with the countries such as Australia, India, Southeast Asian nations, and South Korea; it also seeks to promote the rule of law, freedom of navigation, and free trade; enhance connectivity; and provide capacity-building assistance to regional partners. Japan’s vision of Free and Open Indo-Pacific has evolved over time. In 2018 the Japanese government desecuritized its FOIP concept in order to ease China’s concern and to make the policy more acceptable to China’s neighbors. It also stopped emphasizing the importance of “universal values” so that countries such as Vietnam and Myanmar could sign up for it. Those decisions indicate that Japan’s guiding principle is based more on realist calculations than liberal ideologies.

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Cherry

Around the world, the current political conjuncture is one of profound challenges for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In the United States, the executive has willfully engaged in a prolonged attempt to weaponize the machinery of the state and radicalize public opinion in order to undermine a democratic election. In the European Union, the increasingly authoritarian relationship between the executive and the judiciary in Poland and Hungary is posing the most profound threat to European constitutionalism in decades. In Hong Kong, the Chinese state is actively seeking to undermine legislative and judicial independence in the face of unprecedented pro-democracy mobilizations. In India, Lebanon, Bolivia, and elsewhere mass mobilizations are challenging, and being suppressed in the name of, the rule of law. Here in Canada, the Wet’suwet’en and their supporters, as well as the Tsleil Waututh, Haudenosaunee, L’nu (Mi’kmaq), Inuit, and members of countless other Indigenous nations are contesting the very nature of the rule of law, as they assert Indigenous laws against the law enforcement of the colonial state. Around the world, the use of emergency powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is also raising profound constitutional concerns.


Author(s):  
Michael C. Dorf ◽  
Michael S. Chu

Lawyers played a key role in challenging the Trump administration’s Travel Ban on entry into the United States of nationals from various majority-Muslim nations. Responding to calls from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which were amplified by social media, lawyers responded to the Travel Ban’s chaotic rollout by providing assistance to foreign travelers at airports. Their efforts led to initial court victories, which in turn led the government to soften the Ban somewhat in two superseding executive actions. The lawyers’ work also contributed to the broader resistance to the Trump administration by dramatizing its bigotry, callousness, cruelty, and lawlessness. The efficacy of the lawyers’ resistance to the Travel Ban shows that, contrary to strong claims about the limits of court action, litigation can promote social change. General lessons about lawyer activism in ordinary times are difficult to draw, however, because of the extraordinary threat Trump poses to civil rights and the rule of law.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sudha N. Setty

Published: Sudha Setty, Obama's National Security Exceptionalism, 91 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 91 (2016).This Article discusses how continued national security exceptionalism engenders a view of the United States as considering itself to be above international obligations to investigate and prosecute torturers and war criminals, and the view by the global community that the United States is willing to apply one standard for itself, and another for the rest of the world. Exceptionalism not only poses real challenges in terms of law, morality, and building useful relationships with allied nations, but acts as a step backward for the creation of enforceable international norms and standards, and in efforts to restore a balance in the rule of law when it comes to national security matters.


Yuridika ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 663
Author(s):  
Iwan Satriawan ◽  
Devi Seviyana

The research aims to analyze the power and limit of the state and whether Indonesia has properly adopted the concept of powers and limits during state emergency of COVID-19 pandemic. The method of the research was normative legal research which used statute and case approach were employed for data analysis. The result shows that a state may apply some types of power in an emergency condition. However, in using its powers, the government must consider principle of limits in a state of emergency. In fact, Indonesia does not properly adopt the balance of power and limit in the state of emergency during COVID-19 pandemic. It is true that the government may take actions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the State cannot exceed the limitations of using powers in accordance with state emergency principle. There was a tendency to exceed the limits by the State during the pandemic. The State has violated some state of emergency principles during COVID-19 pandemic such as temporary, the rule of law, necessity, proportionally, intangibility, constitutionalism, harmony, and supervision. The research recommends that the Government and the House of Representatives (the DPR) in the future should obey the state of emergency principles, particularly in terms of state power limits to respect constitutional principles and rule of law. In addition, individuals, groups of people, or organizations may submit judicial review of laws or regulations that violate the state of emergency principles in handling pandemic in the light of protecting the fundamental rights of citizens.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-174
Author(s):  
Luiz Felipe Brandao Osorio

RESUMO:Dentro do emaranhado teórico cunhado como teoria crítica do direito, cabe aqui resgatar a sua vertente mais radical, aquela que vai à recôndita essência do fenômeno jurídico, e que consequente perpassa a face em que suas fraturas ficam mais expostas: a teoria materialista do direito internacional. O britânico China Miéville brinda-nos com uma reflexão original sobre a seara internacionalista, partindo e retomando as pistas legadas por Evguiéni Pachukanis, no início do século XX, para atingir o cume da crítica do direito, pela teoria da forma mercantil, ressaltando o caráter violento, de coerção, presente inerentemente na relação jurídica. É neste mundo, o do império do direito, é que reinam a miséria e o horror cotidianos e banalizados. ABSTRACT:Within the theoretical entanglement coined as critical legal studies, it is needed to address its most radical aspect, that goes inside the hidden essence of the legal phenomenon, and which consequently touches the face in which its fractures are most exposed: the materialist theory of international law. British China Miéville brings us an original reflection on the internationalist scenario, starting with and returning to the trails left by the early 20th century by Evguiéni Pachukanis to reach the summit of the critique of law, by the theory of commodity form, emphasizing the violent side, coercive, inherent in the legal relationship. It is in this world, the one of the rule of law, that daily and banal misery and horror reign


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet McLean

In this article the author argues for the importance of law even in the face of a global pandemic, suggests some ways that law helps to reveal and articulate the moral issues at stake, and sketches the legal controversies surrounding the Covid-19 lockdown.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toby S. Goldbach

49 Cornell International Law Journal 618 (2016).This Article explores international judicial education and training, which are commonly associated with rule of law initiatives and development projects. Judicial education programs address everything from leadership competencies and substantive review of human rights legislation to client service and communication, skills training on docket management software, and alternative dispute resolution. Over the last twenty years, judicial education in support of the rule of law has become big business both in the United States and internationally. The World Bank alone spends approximately U.S. $24 million per year for funded projects primarily attending to improving court performance. And yet, the specifics of judicial education remains unknown in terms of its place in the industry of rule of law initiatives, the number of judges who act as educators, and the mechanisms that secure their participation. This Article focuses on the judges’ experiences; in particular, the judges of the Supreme Court of Israel who were instrumental in establishing the International Organization of Judicial Training.Lawyers, development practitioners, justice experts, and government officials participate in training judges. Less well known is the extent to which judges themselves interact internationally as learners, educators, and directors of training institutes. While much scholarly attention has been paid to finding a global juristocracy in constitutional law, scholars have overlooked the role that judges play in the transnational movement of ideas about court structure, legal procedure, case management, and court administration. Similarly, scholarship examines the way legal norms circulate, the source of institutional change, and the way “transnational legal processes” increase the role of courts within national legal systems. There is little scholarly attention, however, to judges as actors in these transnational processes. This Article situates judicial education and training within the context of judicial functions as an example of judicial involvement in non-caserelated law reform. This Article challenges the instrumental connection between judicial education and the rule of law, arguing that international judicial education became a solution at the same time that the problem— a rule of law deficit— was being identified. This Article also explores whether international judicial education can stand as an instantiation of a global judicial dialogue. Judges have immersed themselves in foreign relations. They are, however, less strategic in pushing their ideological agenda than literature about judges and politics would suggest. This Article argues that judges experience politics as a series of partial connections, which resemble most legal actors’ engagement with the personal and the political.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-171
Author(s):  
Mohammad Fadel

This work grew out of a series of lectures that were delivered over atwo-year period between 1996 and 1998 at the Centre of Islamic andMiddle Eastern Law (CIMEL) at the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies (SOAS), University of London, on the genera] subject of the rule oflaw in the Middle East and Islamic countries. Subsequently, materials wereadded dealing particularly with issues relating to human rights law. Thecontributors to this work are a combination of legal academics, human rights activists, lawyers and judges, who hale from various countries in theArab world, Iran, the United States, Great Britain and Germany.There are a total of fourteen separate chapters, of varying length andquality. The book is not lengthy - including notes and authors’ biographies,it is 180 pages long. The average length of each chapter is between ten andfifteen pages. Despite the diversity of countries surveyed, all the essays areconcerned with generic questions regarding the rule of law, whether in atheoretical sense, viz., whether the notion that legitimate governmentalaction is limited to those acts that are deemed lawful by a pre-existing setor rules, or in a practical sense, viz., assuming that the formal legal regimeof a given state recognizes the rule of law in a theoretical sense, whetherthe coercive apparatus of the state in fact recognizes legal limitations onits conduct.Perhaps the most interesting (it is certainly the most lengthy, at 35 pages),and most important, essay in this work is the very fiit one, authored byAdel Omar Sherif, an Egyptian judge, wherein the author provides a digestof the landmark decisions of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court.While the work can be criticized for taking on the appearance of a meresurvey of decisions, without taking a critical perspective to the Court’sprecedents, it is nonetheless a very valuable contribution for those lawyersand scholars who cannot read Arabic but nonetheless wish to gain insightinto Egypt’s legal culture. The modest task of relating the decisions ofEgypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court is especially important given thecliches regarding the absence of effective judicial institutions in the Arabworld. Sherifs contribution effectively dispels that myth. His article revealsthe Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court to be a vibrant institution thattakes its constitutional duties seriously, and discharges those duties withintegrity, and when it finds that the government has acted unlawfully, it willstrike down the offensive legislation, or rule against the government ...


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