In 2022, the CEDAW Committee issued an Individual Communication concerning Rosanna Flamer-Caldera, a lesbian woman, human rights defender, and Executive Director of the only organization in Sri Lanka advocating for the rights of the entire lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex community. To date, the CEDAW Committee has received extensive criticisms concerning its neglect of women from diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. In this Communication, the Committee found that Sri Lanka's criminalization of consensual same-sex relations among women violates Articles 2, 5, 15, and 16 of the Convention. Importantly, the Committee makes clear that non-heterosexual relations fall within the right to marriage and family relations, enshrined in the Convention. With numerous States Parties in the region retaining criminalization, this article analyses the implications of this decision for States Parties in Asia and grapples with the question, “Is this Communication ground-breaking?” and if so, how.

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.

South Asia, as a region, consists of several stateless groups as well as groups at the risk of statelessness. However, none of the South Asian states are parties to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, thus these states do not have specific obligations arising from this Convention to avoid, reduce, or prevent statelessness in the region. In this context, this article ascertains that despite the prevalence of statelessness, there exists state practice and opinio juris in South Asia that point to an emerging customary international law obligation to avoid, reduce, or prevent statelessness.

International legal discourses clash in violent ways within the state. For example, the international discourse on human rights identifies some individuals who oppose state-sanctioned projects as Indigenous peoples while the international discourse about terrorism may identify them as terrorists. These clashes are occurring throughout the world, particularly surrounding extractive resource projects, but this article considers one example from the Philippines where some B'laan individuals and communities oppose the Tampakan Copper-Gold Mine, and examines how various actors identify those individuals and communities. It explores how some identify them as Indigenous peoples while others identify them as terrorists. In highlighting the violent effects of international law, it investigates how discourse inhibits appreciation of violent erasures and the continuing coloniality of extractive resource development.

The universal system of protection against torture established by the United Nations (UN) is confronted with daily incidents of torture and other cruelties in all regions of the world. Moreover, despite the ratification of UN treaties, most governments lack a genuine commitment to address these abuses. In contrast, the anti-torture safeguards under the UN Convention against Torture and its Optional Protocol are currently being implemented in Taiwan, even though Taiwan is not part of the UN and cannot participate in the international human rights dialogue. The process of incorporation of UN anti-torture documents by a non-UN member is all but easy. This article shows, however, that commitment to combat torture goes beyond the UN treaty system and might be a welcome contribution towards the current debate on fostering compliance with human rights treaties both in Asia-Pacific and around the globe.

This paper opens a scholarly discourse about Chinese scholars’ engagement with TWAIL (Third World Approach to International Law). This paper shows that Chinese international law scholars and TWAIL align in their resistance to Eurocentrism in international law, while they differ in their attitude towards whether to refrain from “national allegories” and criticize international law as a state-centric invention. A state-centric approach means that mainstream Chinese international lawyers tend to adopt a pragmatic attitude towards international law, employing it as a strategic weapon. During the course of this inquiry, this paper also observes a critical strand in Chinese academics – mostly outside of the international law discipline, and within the disciplines of history and philosophy – that is dedicated to redeeming China's subjectivity and history, which may be useful to understand Chinese critical spirit.

To foreign investors, data, either collected and processed before or after market entry in the host state, can be regarded as a part of the investment and subject to the protection of the applicable international investment agreements (IIAs). China has been developing rigorous and stringent data governance such as data localization requirements and mandatory business-to-government data sharing, and has also concluded the world's second largest IIA regime that provides sweeping investment protection. There is a risk of incompatibility between China's national data policies and its IIA obligations. Foreign investors may challenge China's national laws and practices on data governance, for alleged breaches of investor's protection obligations in Chinese IIAs, or breaches of the data residency provisions in Chinese trade and investment agreements. As a result, potential exists for such claims to be brought against China in investor-state arbitration.

The entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in January 2021 has sparked much discussion of the Treaty's positive obligations under Article 6. But while victim assistance under Article 6(1) has received considerable attention, the environmental remediation obligation within Article 6(2) remains underexplored. Filling this gap, this article examines a specific issue relating to environmental remediation under Article 6(2): the scope of nuclear weapons-related activities captured by the obligation imposed upon TPNW parties. Ultimately, it is revealed that significant ambiguity exists as to the scope of activities covered when applying the rules of treaty interpretation of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. After offering some policy arguments both for and against a broad interpretation, this paper recommends that TPNW parties should begin to advance and clarify their positions on this issue in order to clearly identify the scope of Article 6(2).