The Year in Review 2018

2018 was a busy year for ABLI. We published our first two texts—Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Asia and Regulation of Cross-Border Transfers of Personal Data in Asia, both of which were and remain available for free download.  As to events, we held the 2018 Emergence Conference: Asian Perspectives on the Future of the Harmonisation and Convergence of Business Laws, with the UNCITRAL Regional Centre for Asia and the Pacific—where 500 people attended to see 23 speakers from 11 jurisdictions. We also acted as the sole knowledge partner for the ASEAN Law Association’s ASEAN Law Conference: The Power of One – Unlocking Opportunities in ASEAN Through Law. Work also accelerated on ABLI’s Restructuring Project. The joy of these achievements were tempered by our sadness as a result of the passing of one of our mentors, Dr Shinjiro Takagi.

With respect to the Foreign Judgments Project, we published our first text—Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Asia. We also published translations of the Cambodian and Myanmar reports from English into Khmer and Burmese respectively. The Project Lead, Dr Adeline Chong, presented the findings of the first phase of the project at the 20th Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law, held for the first time in the Congress’s 94 year history in Asia (Fukuoka, Japan). The second phase of the project also commenced in earnest.

As to the Data Privacy Project, we organised and held the Towards a Shared Legal Ecosystem for International Data Flows in Asia forum at the Supreme Court of Singapore, attended by 90 experts, regulators and government officials from 19 jurisdictions. The project was mentioned as one of the three key initiatives to watch in 2018 in Hogan Lovells’ Asia Pacific Data Protection and Cyber Security Guide 2018. In May, we published our second publication—Regulation of Cross-Border Transfers of Personal Data in Asia, which has been downloaded over 4,000 times. The Project Lead (and ABLI’s own) Dr Clarisse Girot presented the findings of the first phase of the project at the 2018 Annual Forum of the Research Alliance for Data Governance and Cyber Security in Beijing, China. Lastly, we were extremely pleased to see the project mentioned in the Supreme Court of India’s high-profile Aadhaar judgment.

Thank you

We wish to thank all the people, of which there are too many name, who freely and kindly volunteered their expertise, time and effort to assist in making the above achievements a reality. We could not have done it without each of you.