Asia-Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications' industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.     

Police civil liability for inappropriate response to domestic assault victims

Over the last several years, the criminal justice system has encouraged survivors of domestic abuse to report their victimization to law enforcement authorities. While some pieces of evidence suggest that police are more sensitive to the plight of domestic survivors, law enforcement response remains incomplete and problematic. This article explores this issue, focusing on police civil liability for inappropriate response to domestic violence. It discusses a specific legal remedy—the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—highlighting the circumstances under which police are held liable when they fail to prevent victims' injuries because of their inappropriate response to domestic violence. The article concludes that police need more training and education on family abuse so they can become more responsive to victims of domestic violence.     

Criminality Among Rural Stimulant Users in the United States

Despite the increase in media attention on "meth cooking" in rural areas of the United States, little is known about rural stimulant use, particularly the criminality associated with stimulant use. Data were collected from community stimulant users in rural Ohio, Arkansas, and Kentucky (N=709). Findings from three logistic regression models indicate that younger stimulant users (x =32.55, SD = 10.35), those with more convictions, and those who used crack frequently were significantly more likely to have been arrested for committing a substance-related crime, a property crime, or another crime in the 6-months before entering the study. Implications include the need for longitudinal studies to further understand rural stimulant use as well as increasing community and corrections-based drug abuse prevention and treatment interventions for stimulant users who live in rural areas.     

"Braxton Hick's" or the birth of a new era? Tracing the development of Ireland's abortion laws in respect of European Court of Human Rights Jurisprudence

In Ireland, Article 40.3.3 degrees of Bunreacht na hEireann (the Irish Constitution) guarantees the right to life of the unborn child and the equal right to life of the mother. Abortion in Ireland is permissible only where there is a real and substantial risk to the mother's own life. Since Ireland became a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950,2 there have been concerns that it could result in Ireland being compelled to introduce a right to abortion. This article commences with a review of the extant law on abortion in Ireland, tracing the Constitutional protection afforded to the unborn child. The article will discuss the impact of the European Court of Human Rights' jurisprudence in regard to access to abortion and to information on abortion services in Ireland in an effort to ascertain if it really has resulted in a radical change to Irish abortion laws. As such, it will also be necessary to examine the more recent decisions of the ECtHR such as Tysiac v. Poland, and A, B, and C v. Ireland, to determine both the approach of the ECtHR to access to abortion in general and also to consider if it has resulted in a liberalisation of abortion law in Ireland.     

Franchise Extension and the British Aristocracy

Using evidence from the Second Reform Act, introduced in the United Kingdom in 1867, we analyze the impact of extending the vote to the unskilled urban population on the composition of the Cabinet and the background characteristics of Members of Parliament. Exploiting the sharp change in the electorate caused by franchise extension, we separate the effect of reform from that of underlying constituency‐level traits correlated with the voting population. Our results are broadly supportive of a claim first made by Laski (1928): there is no causal effect of the reform on the political role played by the British aristocracy.     

Ethnicity,citizenship and reproduction: Taiwanese wives making citizenship claims in Malaysia

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender.