The women’s movement in the Republic of Korea has been one of the most active and impactful in the region. South Korea joined CEDAW in 1984 and ratified its optional protocol in 2006. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has led important reforms. But women activists are now facing a severe backlash, and the ministry itself is under attack. Korean feminist activist OH Kyung-jin will discuss the history and development of the women’s movement, the role played by CEDAW in its achievements, and the factors that have produced the current backlash against women’s rights activism.

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has recently started highlighting the importance of promoting “foreign-related rule of law,” a new category of law that knits together Chinese and international law to govern China’s offshore activities. One place to look for foreign-related rule of law in action is in Chinese-invested overseas special economic zones, which some foreign scholars view as extraterritorial zones under Chinese power and law.

Over a decade has passed since the United Nations adopted the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Human Rights Now, a Tokyo-based international human rights NGO, works to promote awareness and implementation of the principles in Asia.

China’s staggering economic development over the past four decades owes much to the effectiveness of its tax system. Wei Cui, a professor of law and tax expert at the University of British Columbia, will share highlights from his 2022 book The Administrative Foundations of the Chinese Fiscal State, in which he introduces the politics, policies, and practices of tax collection in China.

The UN Security Council is again deadlocked, this time over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But Professor Bing Bing Jia, one of China’s leading international law scholars, argues that the United Nations remains irreplaceable as a forum for diplomacy and for breaking political stalemates through application of international law. 

China’s Direction under Xi Jinping: What We Learned from the Party Congress

At a time when the capacity for effective UN Security Council responses, even in response to aggression, seems stymied, how should we understand the posture of China and India in response to Ukraine and other formidable global challenges, including climate change?

Recent developments in the United States and Asia make this a good time to examine the state of women’s rights protection, with a particular focus on the interplay between domestic and international law and norms.

James Bacchus, a founding member and former chairman of the Appellate Body of the WTO, argues that the devastating global economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically illustrated the WTO’s weaknesses and the need to update its rules to confront future pandemics and climate change and achieve sustainable development.

Many debates exist about the nature of China’s engagement with the international “rule-based” order and whether the arrangements underpinning the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) will be formalized into hard laws. Our speakers will demonstrate how China’s provincial governments re-interpret the BRI to generate a new international economic agenda largely driven by regional interests.

Rising sea levels due to climate change are affecting the livelihoods of millions of persons in Asia-Pacific. While engineers develop physical adaptations, the UN’s International Law Commission (ICL) has been studying needed adaptations to international legal frameworks in order to protect the status and rights of affected states.

Investment treaties are said to improve the rule of law in the states that enter into them. N. Jansen Calamita and Ayelet Berman will unpack this theory and present the first empirical study of the internalization of investment treaties in eight Asian states.

In his forthcoming book Line of Advantage: Japan’s Grand Strategy in the Era of Abe Shinzo, Dr. Michael Green argues that no other country has devised a grand strategy for managing China’s rising economic and military power as deliberately or successfully as Japan. Green

Following China’s recent barrage of incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, experts and officials on both sides of the Pacific are analyzing the risk of military conflict and options for keeping peace in the Taiwan Strait at a time of significant pressure on US-China.

How do lawyers maintain the Olympic dream of international cooperation governed by mutually accepted rules? The recently concluded 2020 Tokyo Olympics provides an opportunity to explore select issues facing lawyers…