FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Below are my forthcoming publications, available for download here as post-prints. A full list of my publications is available on my faculty website. Pre-print downloads are also available on my SSRN and academia.edu pages.
Situating Hong Kong’s ‘Rule of Law’ Internationally
Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law, forthcoming (with Noam Zamir)
​
​The rule of law is often cast as the primary governance ideology of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a capitalist, common law legal jurisdiction that had, at least until a recent political crackdown, strained to differentiate itself from authoritarian, socialist, mainland China over its northern border. This article explores government conceptions of the rule of law in Hong Kong, benchmarked against rule of law standards adopted by member states at the United Nations (UN). We argue that Hong Kong’s ‘official’ rule of law definition is at odds with an evolving international consensus on the rule of law within domestic legal and political systems. This has especially been the case after 2005, with the strengthening of rule of law discourse at the UN General Assembly and the rule of law’s increasing political contestation and weaponisation in Hong Kong. Compared with the contemporary consensus expressed at the UN, Hong Kong’s rule of law definition, as favoured by the territory’s executive, legislative and judicial branches, possesses a narrower ambit, but is also more finely articulated.
National Narcotics Agencies in Southeast Asia:
Relics of the Regional ‘War on Drugs’
Capital Drug Laws in Asia (Chan, Hor, Sato (eds), CUP 2025 forthcoming)
​
Based on extensive in-country fieldwork conducted in 2023, this chapter focuses on the role played by Southeast Asia’s national narcotics agencies in drug policy and enforcement in the region. The four most prominent national narcotics agencies within Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) in Singapore, the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) in Thailand, the Agensi Antidadah Kebangsaan (AADK) in Malaysia, and the Badan Narkotika Nasional (BNN, National Narcotics Board) in Indonesia. Each play roles in law enforcement, rehabilitation, and anti-drug education. Although there are some nuances between countries, this chapter shows that: (a) these four national narcotics agencies, counterintuitively given their powers and public prominence, are mere ‘cogs in the wheel’ of national drug policymaking, the direction of which is instead determined by political actors; and (b) the four agencies and their staff support the death penalty for narcotics crimes and more generally espouse a punitive approach towards drug offenders, reflecting the Southeast Asian agencies’ standing as institutional relics of the region’s ‘War on Drugs’ which began in the 1970s.