This article proposes re-thinking the history of refugee protection in the Southeast Asia region, focusing on the post-World War Two period (1945–1979). It fills a gap in the literature on this period, drawing on archival material. It disrupts a narrative of “human rights exceptionalism” in Southeast Asia. First, it examines the small but powerful role of Southeast Asian states during the drafting of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. These states challenged colonial powers and asserted human rights. Second, it considers the role of key refugee-hosting states in Southeast Asia in developing—with other post-colonial states—regional standards to protect refugees under the auspices of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee, the Aliens Principles of 1961 and Bangkok Principles of 1966. Third, it places international and regional action in the domestic context by drawing on the example of Thailand's protection of Vietnamese refugees. It concludes that the approach in the post-WWII years points to an extended history of protecting refugees in Southeast Asia, and valuable lessons from the Global South for the region and beyond.

This article examines the approaches taken by the Asian Development Bank Administrative Tribunal and the Administrative Tribunal of the Inter-American Development Bank Group in deciding discrimination claims. The article reviews the basic features of each tribunal before examining their jurisprudence on equality of treatment and issues of information disclosure in discrimination cases. Decisions to date have addressed claims of disparate treatment relating to various aspects of remuneration and benefits as well as allegations of arbitrary treatment vis-à-vis others similarly situated. A few cases have involved allegations of discrimination on the basis of sex/gender, one of several protected grounds in equality law. The number of judicial dissents in discrimination cases suggests that the tribunals have encountered some difficulty in handling them. The article points to a gradual but still incomplete approximation of the decisions of such tribunals to contemporary developments in discrimination law, and suggests a possible way forward.

Denied citizenship and persecuted in Myanmar, the Rohingya have fled to various countries, including Malaysia. However, Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. It also has weak domestic legal and regulatory mechanisms to protect refugees and asylum-seekers. In this paper, the authors study the treatment of Rohingya refugees in Malaysia and suggest how the Malaysian legal system can better protect them by adapting international legal practices.

International clean technology diffusion is essential to mitigate and adapt to climate change, while fast and optimal diffusion can be prevented by the paywall of patents. This article explores the deficiency in clean technology diffusion caused by the legal fragmentation and rule complex of international environmental law and intellectual property law. It systematically examines three pathways to foster international clean technology diffusion through: restriction of intellectual property, including imposing external restraints in environmental law; striking internal balancing in maximizing TRIPS flexibilities; and keeping the status quo. It argues that treaty pathways may not work, and an operable pathway to promote clean technology diffusion is to maximize and consolidate TRIPS flexibilities in national laws. This option challenges the popular proposal of a “Doha-like” declaration on TRIPS and climate change due to the paralyzed multilateral trade mechanism, asymmetrical negotiation power of developing countries, prolonged negotiation process, and categorization problem in treaty negotiations.

Despite the Qing Empire's formal inclusion as a member of the Eurocentric community of states by the turn of the 20th century, its lack of full sovereign status was frequently reasserted in practice. This included proceedings where legal norms were unilaterally applied to it as an object of regulation, provoking a pursuit of agency. In particular, the unprecedented foreign occupation and administration of China after the Boxer crisis of 1899–1901 spurred efforts in pedagogy, legal reform, and diplomacy. Several such efforts subsequently overlapped at the Second Hague Conference in 1907. There, Qing diplomats for the first time influenced multilateral negotiations, and discovered a nascent solidarity with other “weak” states in Latin America and Asia. Joint struggle against great power initiatives sparked new conversations about the equality of states, however, major questions about the implications of sovereign status for genuine agency, and the contingent forms of international legal “progress,” remained unresolved.

At the second Belt and Road forum in 2019, the Chinese government set out its intentions to develop a “Green Belt and Road”. This paper will examine critical issues arising from green-financed projects under the Belt and Road. In particular, the root issue of the lack of harmonized sustainability standards for green bonds globally. While there are positive regulatory developments, there is still a big gap between companies’ reporting metrics and investors’ growing expectations of what constitutes “green”—constituting “green washing”. This issue compounds as green projects under the Belt and Road are often complex infrastructure projects, where unexpected (and negative) externalities may sometimes occur on the ground. In this regard, this paper advocates for robust risk management, where accurate forecasting of environmental harm and stakeholder engagement are implemented actively throughout the project's life cycle. Finally, adequate dispute resolution and avoidance measures should be adopted to protect stakeholders.

As the damage caused by COVID-19 has increased exponentially, so too has the insistence that China bears some international responsibility for the unquantifiable damage sustained as a direct result of the state having failed to contain the virus, and to notify the international community of its existence. Some have suggested that the international contagion of the virus may be classified as transboundary harm. The current article analyses the law of transboundary harm, and proposes a set of criteria based on treaty and precedent that may be relied on to properly classify an event as such. It concludes that it is not only incorrect to classify international contagion as transboundary harm, but that to do so would pose a significant risk to the position and treatment of the individual in international law.