The recourse to foreign legal sources by the Southeast Asian constitutional and supreme courts

The purpose of the current analysis is to evaluate the relevance that foreign legal sources have in the decisions of the Southeast Asian Constitutional and Supreme Courts. The primary aims of this study are to illustrate whether and which models of judicial review have been adopted in this area and, as a consequence, to ascertain how wide the phenomenon of the use of foreign sources is in constitutional adjudication. In case non-domestic sources are cited in the jurisprudence, an additional purpose is to realize where these references come from and which role they play in the context of constitutional interpretation. The chapter unfolds as follows. After a brief introduction in Section 1, Section 2 introduces the models of constitutional adjudication adopted and the functions performed by the Southeast Asian Courts. Section 3 provides an account of the use of foreign sources in the Southeast Asian Courts’ decisions, with an in-depth analysis of the recent trends offered by Indonesia, Timor-Leste, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. Lastly, Section 4 concludes with reflections on the influence of legal traditions in the use of foreign sources in constitutional adjudication.