Asian Legal Review

Japan’s relaxation of its weapons-export rules opens a path for talks that could one day lead to Tokyo supplying military equipment to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion, Kyiv’s ambassador to Japan said.
“This allows us to talk,” Yurii Lutovinov said in an interview at Ukraine’s embassy. “Theoretically, it’s a very big step forward.”
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s move last week to ease export rules – Japan’s latest shift away from a strict post-war pacifist stance – has sparked broad…

Singapore and Thailand ranked among the world’s “least miserable” economies in an annual index compiled by a Johns Hopkins University economist, who said Southeast Asia was one of the “healthiest economic neighbourhoods” in the world.
The 2025 Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI), compiled by applied economics professor Steve Hanke, measures the “economic temperature” of a country and seeks to approximate how its average citizen experiences the economy.
This year’s HAMI found that several…

Roblox, a gaming platform popular with kids, announced Thursday that children under 16 in Indonesia will be required to undergo facial scans to verify their age to comply with new restrictions on minors’ use of social media and digital platforms in the country.
Nicky Jackson Colaco, Roblox’s vice-president and global head of public policy, announced the changes in a press conference in Jakarta, describing them among the strictest that the company has implemented anywhere in the world.
She said…

A rejected bid to block police use of facial recognition technology in the UK is likely to lead to an increase in its deployment, according to experts.

A viral appearance in the swimsuit round by a male beauty pageant contestant in the Philippines has sparked a wider debate about male beauty standards and whether pageantry is ready to make room for people who do not fit its traditional ideals.
RJ Perkins, 21, drew widespread attention after a video showed him strutting across an outdoor stage during the swimwear segment of Mister Pampanga, held in the province of Pampanga, north of Manila.
Unlike the chiselled bodies typically associated with…

A series of targeted relief measures are being rolled out in Qatar to support businesses amid the ongoing Middle East conflict.

The pace of tropical forest destruction slowed in 2025 after record losses the year before but remained at worrying levels equivalent to 11 football fields per minute, researchers said Wednesday.
The world lost 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of tropical primary rainforest last year, down 36 per cent from 2024, said researchers from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland.
“A drop of this scale in a single year is encouraging – it shows what decisive…

Perched on the bow of his long-tail fishing boat, 75-year-old Sukjai Yana untangled a handful of small fish from his net, disappointed by his catch and fretting over whether he can sell them.
Some days Sukjai earns nothing: demand for fish is falling due to worries over contamination of the Mekong River and its tributaries by toxic run-off from rare earth mines upstream that is threatening millions who rely on those waters for farms and fisheries.
Chiang Saen, a fishing hub in northern Thailand,…

All energy companies licensed to operate in Britain will be subject to “baseline” cybersecurity requirements – with higher standards imposed on the most ‘critical’ operators – under proposals set out by the UK government and energy regulator Ofgem.

Social media posts of Singapore politicians taking public transport amid the global energy crisis have divided public opinion online, with some users hailing the move as leading by example while others call it showmanship.
Cabinet ministers, members of parliament and even a retired defence minister have followed with their own public transport posts after Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong urged Singaporeans in an April 7 ministerial statement in parliament to take public transport as part of…