This book analyzes the formal constitutional changes that have recently taken place in the Asia-Pacific region, embracing the countries of East and South East Asia and the Pacific Island states. In examining the different constitutional systems in the region, it asks several key questions: What constitutional arrangements operate in the region and how can their fundamental differences be explained? How do social, political and economic factors limit the effectiveness of the existing constitution? What lessons are gained for the practice of constitutionalism elsewhere?

This book examines territorial governance in Asia in the context of central-local relations. The book looks at the constitutional systems for organizing central-local relations and attempts to draw conclusions from contemporary experiences.

This book examines territorial governance in Asia in the context of central-local relations. In an era of attempts to deal with issues such as decentralisation, conflict involving ethnic and religious enclaves, and demands for regional autonomy, it is timely to examine central-local relations in a pan-Asian perspective, assessing the attempts in a range of different constitutional systems from Japan to Myanmar to re-order constitutional structures for local government. The book looks at the constitutional systems for organising central-local relations in Asia and attempts to draw conclusions from contemporary experiences.

This manuscript is a collection of essays on various issues in Asia-Pacific legal systems. It has been written within the framework of comparative legal research; thus, chapters address various of the ASEAN nations, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The topics in this comprehensive volume, which offer Canadian perspectives on contemporary Asian law, include securities, prostitution, environmental, and constitutional law.

While the Asia Pacific region is one of the world's largest by population size, it has long been known for having the least developed regional and national institutional mechanisms for protecting human rights, particularly compared to the well-developed systems in Europe, the Americas, and increasingly in Africa. Asia has the least uptake of human rights treaties of any region in the world, and serious human rights violations are documented as occurring in numerous countries in the region. Asia has also presented conceptual challenges to the universality of international human rights, for instance through arguments about 'Asian values' (the collective over the individual, the economic over the political, compromise over adjudication) being inconsistent with western notions of rights. At the same time, innovative human rights practices and protections have been developed in some jurisdictions, and increasingly at the transnational level. There is increasing scholarly and practitioner interest in human rights in the Asia and Pacific regions, driven in part by recent efforts by the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) to enhance human rights protections in those sub-regions. This edited collection makes a timely and distinctive contribution to the literature by bringing together the leading scholars in the field who have written across the gamut of thematic human rights issues in Asia and the Pacific. A particular strength of the collection is its inclusion of significant Asian and Pacific authors, who are sometimes under-represented in the mainstream legal debates. The work will be of interest to a scholarly and student audience in law (international, comparative Asian, public, constitutional, and human rights), as well as to readers in international relations, political science, Asian studies, and human rights.