Asia is a fascinating laboratory of challenging interactions between religion and constitutional law, either in liberal or non-liberal settings. This panel examines how, in several Asian jurisdictions, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity are being mobilized, invoked and understood by various actors including constitutional courts and commissions – and the effects on the general state of (il)...
Adjudicating Blasphemy : Challenging the Writ of the State in Pakistan
In the past decade, the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) has dealt with several blasphemy cases. In many cases, the person accused of blaspheming is murdered by vigilantes. In some cases, the killers appeal their sentences on the basis that avenging blasphemy is a religious duty, immune to punishment. In this paper, I examine why...
Buddhism‘s Influence on Thailand‘s Constitutional Arrangement
Since 2006, Thailand‘s democracy has been in serious decline. Political power is allocated to a small elite whose control of Thai politics become increasingly pervasive and entrenched. Thailand‘s constitutional design is influenced by two forces; the liberal democratic ideas and the traditional Buddhist values. And the latter is prevailing over more recent developments. Buddhism is...
Lese-Majeste and Sacred Kingship in Southeast Asia
In the works of 18th century comparative constitutional lawyer Montesquieu, the existence and use of lese-majeste laws was the ultimate marker of “oriental despotism“. Today, lese-majeste laws remain in use in various Southeast Asian countries to protect sacred monarchs, most prominently so in Thailand, but also in Brunei or Malaysia – and it was recently...
Religion and Constitutional Design: Divergences and Convergences in Malaysia and Indonesia
Malaysia and Indonesia are the two biggest Muslim-majority countries in Southeast Asia. The ways in which their respective constitutions address the majority religion (Islam), however, are very different. The Federal Constitution of Malaysia provides Islam as the ‘religion of the Federation‘, while in Indonesia, a special constitutional recognition for the majority religion was explicitly rejected...
The Politics of a Contronymic Secularism in Fiji
During Fiji‘s 2012 constitution-drafting process, the Christian State debate repeated as a site of public division. Whereas the constitution commission, the military regime, liberal Christians and Hindu and Muslim Indo-Fijians argued a secular state was necessary to secure political equality and freedom to all Fiji‘s citizens, many indigenous iTaukei demanded the establishment of Christianity as...