Dutch health care occasionally comes under close international scrutiny. The interest usually centres on euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands. A development of perhaps more lasting importance, however, has so far virtually escaped attention elsewhere. It is the incorporation of a bill on patients' rights into the Dutch Civil Code. This article focuses on the new Dutch Act on Medical Services, which came into force on April 1, 1995. As a point of reference, English medical law will be referred to.

With the emergence of transnational business dealings as the norm rather than the exception, international co-operation in the enforcement of competition law has become more important than international co-operation to avoid conflict between individual nations' competition laws. The United States and Canada's most recent attempt to address conflict issues in competition law arising in transnational business dealings was in the negotiation of the 1984 Memorandum of Understanding (hereinafter the ‘MOU’). The MOU is an example of the first stage of international co-operation in competition law as it sets up a framework for the avoidance of conflict in the administration of two countries’ competition laws. However, co-operation to avoid conflicts does not help overcome the jurisdictional difficulties of co-operating countries trying to enforce domestic laws that seek to prosecute foreign conduct with domestic effect, such as those that exist in the US, the European Community and Canada. Six years after the MOU was signed, the Treaty between Canada and the US on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (hereinafter the ‘MLAT’) came into force and signalled a new era of competition law enforcement policy. The MLAT emphasized cooperation between Canada and the US competition enforcement authorities to enhance enforcement, rather than sjmply co-operation to avoid conflict. The expansion of the principle of enforcement enhancement in criminal competition law between the US and Canada to civil competition law was realized by the North American Free Trade Agreement (‘NAFTA’) and more concretely by the recent negotiation of a new agreement between Canada and the US6 (the ‘Canada-US Agreement’). The shift from passive co-operation to avoid conflict in the administration of competition laws to active co-operation to enhance enforcement is significant. The potential result is the correspondent shift in the relationship between a competition enforcement agency and the local business community from a close and open relationship to a more adversarial and closed relationship. A close relationship between a competition enforcement agency and the local business community is necessary as the business community is the enforcement agency's greatest ally in competition law enforcement.

The idea that voluntariness is at the heart of all self-assumed obligations is perhaps the undeniable hallmark of every developed legal system. Hence, virtually all legal systems place great emphasis on the need to establish the voluntariness of consent in contracts, being as they are, a species of voluntarily assumed obligations. Indeed, in virtually all developed legal systems specific rules have been evolved and formulated to give effect to the notion of free consent. However, even if the need and desire for consent to be voluntary and unencumbered by any vitiating factor is generally universal, what constitutes a factor having the effect of vitiating the freeness of a consent is undoubtedly less universal and more inclined to be a function of both culture and religion. This article will attempt to discuss and compare the varied notions of free consent in the different legal systems of some selected ASEAN countries from the perspective of the impact of coercion on consent. It will eventually become apparent that the deep-seated legal tradition that most of these ASEAN countries inherited from their colonial past is now undergoing a gradual transformation, in particular actuated and greatly animated by the need to re-examine and re-evaluate existing rules to make them relevant to popular and indigenous norms and value systems.