Extraterritorial Rights Research Articles

Unequal Treaty in Practice: A Story about Article 23 of the Treaty of Tientsin

Abstract Despite the wealth of research on cross-border activities between China proper and Hong Kong, little has been discussed about the ‘civil fugitives’ who fled from one side to the other during Hong Kong’s early colonial period. Chinese debtors who absconded to China created jurisdictional problems for Hong Kong. The addition of Article 23 in the Treaty of Tientsin was an attempt to solve this issue, and this article explores what the discussions on Article 23, particularly those from 1905 to 1907 among British colonial officials and diplomatic agents, reveal about the characteristics of colonial jurisdiction under international law. In this case, colonial jurisdiction was limited solely to the territory of Hong Kong. Proposals to amend Article 23 attempted to remove the territorial barrier and establish personal jurisdiction for the colonial government in Hong Kong, similar to extraterritorial rights in Qing China.

A Political Consideration on the Japan-Italy TreatyRevision Relations During the Inoue Kaoru Foreign Affairs Era (1879-1887) Centering on Japanese and Italian Primary Sources

In the early Meiji Era, the revision of the so-called “Unequal Treaties” was an issue of vital importance to the Japanese government. In particular, since the early 1880s Foreign Minister Inoue Kaoru (1836-1915), unlike his predecessor Terashima Munenori (1832-1893), who had given priority to the acquisition of tariff autonomy, sought to include in the negotiations with foreign powers also the abolition of extraterritoriality. In this context, the Kingdom of Italy found itself playing a significant role in Inoue’s foreign policy in the 1870s after the Italian diplomats in Tokyo had shown a strong interest in treaty revision aiming to obtain the right for the Italian traders to circulate freely in Japan’s inland areas in exchange for the renunciation of their extraterritorial rights. Since the Japan-Italy Treaty Revision Relations during the management of the Japanese Foreign Ministry by Inoue (1879-1887) have not received sufficient consideration by either Italian or Japanese historiographies, this research aims to examine it in detail, focusing the analysis on the strategic importance that the Kingdom of Italy had for the Japan government in the 1880s. Some still unclarified issues will be illuminated mainly by making use of Japanese primary sources and integrating them with the Italian ones.

Revolution, Race and Citizenship in Press Representations of Indonesians of the Dutch Colonial Army (KNIL) Interned in Australia, 1945–47

This article examines Australian press attention to the violence that erupted when Indonesian soldiers from the Dutch colonial army (KNIL) were interned in Australia during the Indonesian National Revolution (1945–49). Dutch authorities used their extra-territorial rights in Australia to confine mutinous soldiers in camps as colonial subjects. Australian authorities sought to expel these men as ‘aliens’ while also supporting their citizenship of a nascent Republic. Our research refines historical understanding of the impetus behind the 1947 repatriation of these soldiers. Regional press reports and photographs from the mid-1940s accommodated two emerging, complementary notions of citizenship in their mediation of this situation. One was growing support for Australia’s recognition of the citizenship claims of Indonesians wanting an independent Republic, particularly where those claims were violently denied by Dutch authorities in Australia. The other was a steadfast commitment to national sovereignty and citizenship premised on upholding a ‘white Australia’.

The Extraterritorial Voting Rights and Restrictions Dataset (1950–2020)

This paper introduces the Extraterritorial Rights and Restrictions dataset (EVRR), the first global time-series dataset of non-resident citizen voting policies and procedures. Although there have been previous efforts to document external voting, no existing data source simultaneously captures the scale (195 countries), time frame (71 years), and level of detail concerning extraterritorial voting rights and restrictions (over 20 variables). After a brief overview of prior datasets, we introduce EVRR coding criteria with a focus on conceptual clarity and transparency. Descriptive analysis of the dataset reveals both the steady expansion of extraterritorial voting as well as several regional and temporal trends of voting rights restrictions. Finally, we revisit and extend the work of two groundbreaking cross-national studies focused on the causes and effects of external voting rights. Using EVRR data we demonstrate that including more fine-grained aspects of extraterritorial voting provisions in these analyses improves understanding of important political and economic outcomes.

Transnational voting rights and policies in violent democracies: a global comparison

In recent decades more than one hundred countries have enfranchised their diasporas, allowing emigrants to vote from abroad. However, this widespread formal recognition of extraterritorial voting rights does not always lead to increased participation of emigrants in home country politics. Migrant-sending countries have complex relationships with their diasporas, and this relationship is particularly fraught for countries with endemic violence. This article leverages a new dataset documenting the adoption and implementation of extraterritorial voting rights and restrictions for 195 countries from 1950 to 2020 to demonstrate how transnational voting rights and policies in violent democracies differ from other regimes. While violent democracies extend transnational voting rights to their emigrants at rates comparable to other regime types, they are less likely to implement those rights, and when they do implement them, they are more likely to restrict them to insulate domestic politics from external influence.

Base borders: Militarisation and (post-)colonial bordering in Okinawa

This article builds on the political geography of islands and emerging research on the relationship between island, border and sovereignty. Today, islands are recognised as crucial sites for the understanding of contemporary border controls. Military bases that were built during earlier colonial periods are increasingly used for transnational migrant detention practices. This article aims to offer another important insight to the politics of borders from an island perspective. Drawing from the case of Okinawa, the article shows how bases on islands themselves produce borders. Fences and lines that encircle the US bases on Okinawa Island cannot be reduced to conventional military off-limits boundaries. They are particular kinds of borders, which I would call ‘base borders’, that continue to divide the island into military and public spaces and demarcate two seemingly territorially bound sovereignties. Base borders are, however, more than the manifestation of extraterritoriality. While they regulate the mobility of local residents, base borders enable military servicemembers to enjoy extraterritorial rights, including the right to avoid being held responsible for a crime they committed outside the bases. In addition to this uneven mobility control, base borders have a function to control local resistance movements through the criminalisation of the base border crossing by protesters and the authorisation of the use of force by security guards. This article closely investigates how base borders function and are used in reality, and in doing so, it uncovers multiple ways in which base borders reproduce colonial relations between the US military (in coordination with Japan) and Okinawa.

Set and Forget? The Evolution of Business Law in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

This study examines the transplantation and evolution of business law in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic, drawing broader implications for the economic and political determinants of legal transplantation for late industrializers. We show that the underlying political economy context was influential in shaping the way commercial law was transplanted and evolved in Turkey. Extraterritorial rights in the nineteenth century eroded the incentives to demand legal change by providing alternative legal rules to the non-Muslim commercial elite; the nation-building efforts of the twentieth century cultivated a new Muslim business class that was reliant on the state's goodwill for success and could not effectively push for more open access to novel forms of business organization.

A Prolonged Abrogation? The Capitulations, the 1917 Law of Family Rights, and the Ottoman Quest for Sovereignty during World War 1

AbstractThe 1917 promulgation of a new Ottoman family law is recognized as a landmark moment in the history of Islamic law by scholars of women and gender in the Middle East. Yet the significance of the 1917 law in the struggle over religious jurisdiction, political power, and Ottoman sovereignty has been overlooked in the scholarship on both Ottoman legal reform and World War 1. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, German, French, and English sources linking internal interpretations of the law and external reactions to its passage, we reinterpret adoption of the family law as a key moment in the geopolitics of World War 1. We demonstrate that passage of the law was a critical turning point in the wartime process of abrogating the capitulations and eliminating the last vestiges of legal extraterritoriality in the Ottoman Empire. The law is situated in its wartime political context and the geopolitical milieu of larger Europe to demonstrate that, although short-lived, the 1917 family law was a centerpiece of the wartime struggle to define extraterritorial rights of the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and their protégés within the empire.

The Tragic Irony of a Patriotic Mission: The Indigenous Leadership of Francis Wei and T. C. Chao, Radicalized Patriotism, and the Reversal of Protestant Missions in China

Motivated by a patriotic zeal for the national salvation of China, in the 1910s, US-trained Chinese intellectuals like Francis Wei and T. C. Chao embraced a progressive version of Protestantism. While Christian colleges established by liberal missionaries during this time initially contributed greatly to nurturing a generation of intellectual elites for China, its institutionalization of progressive ideas, and its tolerance and protection of revolutionary mobilization under extraterritorial rights, also unintendedly helped invigorate indigenous revolutionary movements. Meanwhile, in the 1920s, anti-Western and anti-Christian student movements radicalized in China’s major urban centers. When the communist revolution showed more promise of granting China independence, Francis Wei and T. C. Chao became optimistic supporters. However, neither of them foresaw the reversal of China missions under the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in the 1950s.

China and Japan’s Northern Frontier: Chinese Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Hokkaido

This article examines the role of Chinese migrants in the development of Hokkaido in the last years of the Tokugawa period and the early Meiji period. The southern part of Hokkaido was the northern frontier of the Japanese realm until the mid-nineteenth century when one of its principal ports, Hakodate, was opened to international trade, and the island as a whole was opened to unrestricted Japanese colonial settlement. Hokkaido’s population ballooned from an estimated 58,000 in 1869 to 1.7 million by 1912 as settlers flooded in. Yet, despite this remarkable population transfer, Hokkaido’s settler colonial history is little known to scholars outside of Japan. Even less known is the role played by Chinese migrants and the China market in Hokkaido’s transformation. Hokkaido’s main economic activity, trade in marine products, developed rapidly (thus luring settlers) based on expanding demand for Hokkaido produce in southern Japan and the distant Yangtze delta. As such, Hakodate developed a thriving Chinese merchant community at least a decade before the Qing established formal trade relations with Japan in 1871–73. This article argues that Chinese migrant merchants were able to dominate Hokkaido’s foreign trade in this period due to a combination of their mercantile talent, market power, and association with (not subordination to) Western firms, which gave them extraterritorial rights. The demand for Hokkaido marine products in China was an important impetus to the expansion of Japanese capital and economic activity into Hokkaido’s frontier areas and hence the merchants involved in this trade played an indirect role in Japanese colonization. This article also briefly touches upon histories of Chinese sailors, agricultural labourers, translators, and technicians who worked in an around Hokkaido in the Meiji period.

Extraterritorial Rights in Border Enforcement

Recent shifts in border enforcement policies raise pressing new questions about the extraterritorial reach of constitutional rights. Policies that keep asylum seekers in Mexico, expand the use of expedited removal, and encourage the cross-border use of force require courts to determine whether noncitizens who are physically outside the United States, or who are treated for legal purposes as being outside even if they have entered the country, can claim constitutional protections. This Article examines a small but growing body of cases addressing these extraterritoriality issues in the border enforcement context, focusing on disparities in judicial analyses that have resulted in at least two circuit splits. Specifically, the Article explores differences in courts’ selection and application of the Supreme Court’s main extraterritoriality tests; various ways of conceptualizing the interaction between the Court’s extraterritoriality jurisprudence and the plenary power doctrine, which one appellate court described as “competing” constitutional fields; and contrasting approaches to the role of separation of powers as a limiting structural principle, given the ambiguity of the Constitution’s text regarding is geographic scope. The separation of powers analysis reflects particular concerns about the executive branch’s manipulation of the border as a legal construct, as well as its manipulation of national security as an illusory threat, in order to evade accountability. The Article concludes that extending constitutional protections, preserving judicial review, and critically examining demands for deference are crucial in this context in order to avoid creating a law-free zone just beyond our southern border.

Can Singapore learn from the European Union in tightening data protection laws?

Since the enactment of the Singapore Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), the Singapore Personal Data Protection Commission has taken many organisations to task, which promotes a high level of confidence in the PDPA among consumers. That said, with the rapid advancement of technology such as cloud computing and the fact that most published breaches in Singapore involved small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is worthwhile examining how an effective data protection law such as the PDPA can be further developed to improve the trust that consumers have in the law, as well as the environment of trust between businesses and consumers. The paper also examines the need to establish a protected and consensual flow of personal data for commercial use in today’s globalised and digital economy. In this regard, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to increase consumers’ confidence and with accountability as the key underlying concept is a suitable reference. This paper will first discuss the need for professional data protection officers in Singapore with reference to the new requirements under the GDPR and the possibility of increasing accountability with the PDPA in doing so. Second, it will examine the possibility of creating extraterritorial rights under the PDPA to address the issue of globalisation and technological issues.

Beneath Sovereignty: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

The rise of extraterritoriality in the nineteenth-century has been described as a transitional phase that laid the ground for the construction of territorial sovereignty. Yet in Egypt, where a particularly extensive extraterritorial regime emerged in the mid-century, the expansion of European jurisdiction underneath national sovereignty became entrenched with the creation of international mixed courts in the 1870s. This outcome, the article argues, was the product of a complex compromise between European empires, which upheld different conceptions of extraterritoriality, and the government of Egypt. While Britain refashioned its own extraterritorial judicial system as a means of promoting legal reforms in the Ottoman world, France aggressively pursued the expansion of extraterritorial rights as an instrument of informal domination and economic exploitation. The creation of an international type of jurisdiction, less susceptible to French political pressures but applying a French system of law, proved acceptable to all parties, although it severely constrained Egyptian sovereignty from within, even after Britain took over the reins of government in 1882. Extraterritoriality was not merely a transition, but an original feature of the global legal order, arising out of modern imperialism and imperial rivalry and yet conducive to the forging of new instruments of international law and governance.

Harnessing the Diaspora

Political rights provided to immigrants by host countries have received much attention in the literature. Less attention, however, has been paid to the extension of extraterritorial rights by home countries. In this article, I focus on a common type of right provided by home countries to their expatriates—the right of dual citizenship. Dual citizenship rights, I argue, help home countries leverage the financial and human resources of their diasporas, encouraging both remittances and return migration. I test this argument using migrant surveys performed in six host countries and find that migrants from homelands that extend dual citizenship are more likely to both remit and express a desire to return home. The micro finding regarding remittances is confirmed using aggregate panel data for a large sample of homelands over the period 1980-2009. The results point to the importance of political rights and policies as extended by the migrant’s homeland.

A Specter of Extraterritoriality

The Sino-u.s. agreement of May 1943 that granted the u.s. military exclusive criminal jurisdiction over its troops in China was a continuation of extraterritorial rights that the United States supposedly abolished the previous January. In light of the earlier British-u.s. negotiations on the same issue, China was an integral part of a legal regime that during World War ii shielded globally deployed u.s. troops from local laws. The Chinese Guomindang (gmd) government’s renewal of the 1943 agreement in June 1946 extended the wartime legal privileges of u.s. troops into an era of precarious peace in China and set a precedent for the Status of Forces Agreements between the United States and various allies during the Cold War. The demonstrations after the Shen Chong Incident in late 1946, a largely nationalist movement that the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) co-opted, highlighted the inadequacy of public indignation and ccp manipulation in mounting a consistent legal effort to challenge the entrenched extraterritorial privileges of u.s. troops and restore Chinese jurisdiction. The gmd government also lost the opportunity to use the jurisdictional issue to demonstrate its nationalist credentials to an agitated public.

Legal Orientalism: China, The United States, and Modern Law, by Teemu Ruskola

Legal Orientalism: China, United States, and Modern Law, by Teemu Ruskola. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. 338 pp. $35.00 (cloth). Teemu Ruskola's Legal Orientalism focuses attention on extraterritorial laws and Chinese sovereignty in the last half of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries. It accepts Turan Kayoglu's Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (London and New York, 2010) and the concept of to argue that extraterritoriality indexed sovereignty, the nation-state was the sine qua non of modernity, so in effect legal imperialism created It contends Par Kristoffer Cassel's claim in Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford, 2012), that China tolerated extraterritoriality and the Unequal Treaty system because old regimes valued commercial, legal, and military modernization projects and played an active, not passive role adapting to change. Each book reinforces modernization arguments while raising new questions about and legitimation. Legal Orientalism sees unequal treaties and the Treaty Port system in relation to Empire Studies. A lawyer and professor of law, Ruskola asks China scholars to take seriously. Extraterritorial claims were not fictional. Since the imperialists applied doctrines of extraterritoriality all over the world, moreover Chinese culture is not the issue. precedent is that treaties and claims to extraterritorial rights in forwarded what became law. A legal scholar, Ruskola shows how previous historiography has conflated comparative (the academic study of other legal systems) with (universally acknowledged modern axioms that regulate states' rights and individual rights). His distinction mitigates confusion, and shows how authorized itself in colonization practices. If Ruskola is correct that China's consolidation as a nation state came under tutelage then splitting hairs over modifiers like accidental empire, informal empire, colonial modernity and without colonies, means only that the category colonialism accommodates variety and extraterritorial law-making created an Empire. In fact, Ruskola reperiodizes the onset of the empire to 1844 when the United States signed the so-called Treaty of Wanghia and not with the invasion of Manila in 1898 or Perry's arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1854. Ruskola is specific. Caleb Cushing, missionary diplomat Peter Parker and the Reverend Elijah Coleman Bridgeman convinced the State Department that extraterritoriality legitimated expansionism on and off the China mainland. Thus, in Ruskola's argument, Commodore Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay with a copy of the Wanghia Treaty in his pocket and used it as his model for subordinating Japan. rise of racial science and its role in imperialism (what Ruskola calls American racial Anglo-Saxonism) in Asia accompanied, in other words, a established juridical platform that gave the United States power to authorize a foundationally racialized international (p. 149). most exuberant chapter in the book is The District of China is Not the District of Columbia, where Ruskola launches his conclusions reductio ad absurdum. I am a connoisseur of this kind of argument, so love it. established a U.S. Court for the District of China. But the law that the Court for the District of China would be enforcing had to be written since there was no precedent in the United States Constitution for declaring jurisdiction over another country. …

Korean Family Registration in Manchukuo: Status of Korean People and Extraterritorial Rights of Japanese Subject

Korean Family Registration in Manchukuo: Status of Korean People and Extraterritorial Rights of Japanese Subject

Treaty law: the extent of consular jurisdiction in North Africa from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century

This article is based on a close comparative examination of the Treaties between the North African States of the Ottoman Empires, and Morocco on the one hand and the states of Western Europe and North America on the other in the early modern period. It shows that they formed a corpus of regulations and understandings that underpinned a ‘customary’ diplomatic law. It challenges the view that Europeans and North Americans legally enjoyed extraterritorial rights, because consuls had complete jurisdiction over their own subjects in legal cases where only their own subjects were involved. It argues that the boundaries of the consuls' job were very blurred in the treaties which was a result of the terminology used and the double function of consuls: to control their subjects as much as to protect them.

Extraterritorial Rights and Constitutional Methodology after Rasul V. Bush

Extraterritorial Rights and Constitutional Methodology after Rasul V. Bush

Excavating Extraterritoriality: The "Judicial Sub-Prefect" as a Prototype for the Mixed Court in Shanghai

�� It is fairly well established in Western historiography on China that the early treaty port system in general and extraterritoriality in particular were not simply forced on China by the Western powers, but rather were a product of joint efforts to establish a new modus vivendi. In an essay on the “unequal treaties” and the traditional Chinese tributary system, John K. Fairbank pointed out that “the treaty system in its early decades from 1840s to the 1880s was not merely a device for bringing China into the Western world; it may equally well be viewed as a Qing device for accommodating the West and giving it a place within the Chinese world.” 1 In a similar vein, Joseph Fletcher regarded the treaties with the West as an extension of privileges that had already been conceded to the khanate of Kokand in 1836. By granting Kokand traders extraterritorial rights, the Qing Empire was essentially acquiescing to “a time-honoured custom among Muslim traders,” a custom which in the eastern Mediterranean had given rise to the ca