Critics agree that much of Southeast Asia desperately needs judicial reform and rule of law. Yet, there is remarkably little comparative scholarship on law and legal institutions in the region. In this blog, I'll follow constitutional developments in Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
No porn for you
Indonesia's Constitutional Court threw out another challenge to the controversial anti-pornography law. According to Jakarta Post, activist lawyer Farhat Abbas filed a complained alleging that the law contradicted itself by punishing the storage of pornographic materials, but creating an exemption for personal use. The Court responded that the law is constitutional, and the court's jurisdiction only allows it to determine the constitutionality of laws, not resolve internal contradictions. In the U.S., I suspect one might argue that the law's internal contradictions make it "unconstitutionally vague" (and indeed much of U.S. vagueness jurisprudence seems to revolve around porn/obscenity cases), but I'm not aware of any such doctrine in Indonesian law.
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