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Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon: Keynote Address at the 10th Anniversary of the Asian Business Law Institute
ASIAN BUSINESS LAW INSTITUTE
Keynote Address at the 10th Anniversary of the Asian Business Law Institute
26 August 2026
The Honourable the Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon
Supreme Court of Singapore
Dr. Christophe Bernasconi, Secretary-General of the Hague Conference on Private International Law
Justice Kannan Ramesh, Chair of the Board of Governors
Justice A.K. Sikri and
Professor Lucy Reed, members of the Board of Governors
Representatives of the Founding Partners of the Asian Business Law Institute
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen
I. Introduction
1. It is a real pleasure for me to address you this morning as we mark the tenth anniversary of the Asian Business Law Institute. An anniversary such as this invites us not only to celebrate the Institute’s achievements, but also to reflect on how the world has changed and on the role the Institute might play in the world that is now taking shape.
2. When the Institute was launched in 2016, I observed that business had become irreducibly transnational. Goods, services, capital and information moved through networks that paid little heed to national borders. A single enterprise might source components in one country, process data in another, raise finance in a third and sell to consumers around the world. Commerce had acquired a global reach, while the laws that supported commerce remained largely national.1
3. That disjunct mattered because law is indispensable to commerce. Businesses transact against the backdrop of legal rules on which they depend to define rights, allocate risk and furnish effective remedies when things go wrong. Where a transaction spans several legal systems, differences between them may impose real costs in having to understand unfamiliar rules, adapt one’s commercial arrangements and resolve one’s disputes across borders.2
4. Asia presented this challenge in an especially acute form. It was, and remains, home to an extraordinary diversity of legal traditions. Southeast Asia is perhaps the clearest illustration. Its legal systems have been shaped by different histories, institutions and stages of economic development, without being united by a single common legal tradition. That diversity is a source of richness. But unless it is carefully navigated, it can also generate uncertainty, friction and distrust.3
5. It was against that backdrop that the Institute was established as a standing research institution dedicated to advancing thoughtful legal convergence in Asia.4 Convergence, properly understood, is not sameness. It is the disciplined search for sufficient common ground to enable different legal systems to work together, while respecting the social, political and economic circumstances of the societies they serve.5
6. The Institute’s design reflected three related ideas. It would be Asian in focus, because the region needed an institution that was attentive to its distinctive diversity and commercial needs. It would be polycentric in method, drawing together judges, governments, practitioners, businesses, in-house counsel, academics and international organisations. And it would be practice-oriented, producing principles, guides and other tools that policymakers, courts and commercial actors could use.6
7. Ten years on, these founding choices remain sound. But the world in which the Institute now operates is markedly different from the one in which it was conceived.
II. A changed yet enduring landscape
8. In 2016, globalisation still appeared to be a rising, and perhaps irreversible, tide. The world seemed smaller, and the possibilities for trade and investment ever more expansive. Since then, the political mood in many developed economies has shifted. Brexit called into question assumptions about the permanence of even mature projects of regional integration. Tariffs, industrial policy and economic security moved to the centre of political debate, while the pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains.
9. These developments have proven to be more than a temporary interruption. They reveal a deeper unease about the distribution of the gains and burdens of globalisation. Some of the sharpest resistance to globalisation has emerged in the same developed economies that had once been among its principal architects. Openness came increasingly to be viewed through the lenses of resilience, strategic autonomy and national security. Supply chains were no longer assessed only for efficiency, but also for their exposure to geopolitical risk.
10. We should not understate the significance of these changes. The global setting for commerce has become more contested. But yet, interdependence has proved more durable than the optimism that once accompanied it. Supply chains, to be sure, have been diversified and re-routed, but they have not retreated completely behind national borders. Data, capital and services continue to move across jurisdictions on a vast scale. Global trade in goods and services reached a record of about US$35 trillion in 2025.7 So the commercial world remains deeply interconnected, even as the political world might have become more fragmented.
11. I suggest that geopolitical fragmentation makes legal cooperation more, not less, important. When political relations are strained and commercial networks are being reconfigured, businesses need reliable legal frameworks more than ever to price risk and plan across borders.
12. The past decade offers several illustrations of such cooperation continuing despite political fragmentation.
(a) The Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements, which had only recently entered into force when the Institute was launched, has now been in force in Singapore for almost ten years and has matured into an established component of our framework for international commercial litigation.
(b) UNCITRAL has likewise continued to build the legal infrastructure of international commerce. One example is the UNCITRAL Model Law on Automated Contracting, which is intended to facilitate the use of automation in contracts, including through artificial intelligence.8
(c) Digital Economy Agreements have also emerged as a modern form of convergence, enabling the open and trusted use of data and facilitating interoperable rules, standards and policies for seamless cross-border digital trade.9
13. These are practical acts of legal cooperation, directed to areas in which common rules can generate mutual benefit. They remind us that legal convergence is not an artefact of an earlier, more optimistic phase of globalisation, nor does it depend on political homogeneity. It is a practical response to continuing economic interdependence. In a more fragmented world, it also performs a deeper function: it promotes predictability and trust across borders.
III. ABLI’s role today
14. This brings me to ABLI’s place in the world today. Amid the turbulence of the past decade, Asia, and Southeast Asia in particular, has retained a measure of relative stability. I do not suggest that the region is insulated from strategic competition, economic disruption or political difference. But compared with the increasingly polarised debates elsewhere, it has largely preserved a pragmatic commitment to openness, connectivity and practical cooperation.
15. One tangible expression of that commitment was the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which began to enter into force in 2022. At a time when economic integration was under strain elsewhere, the agreement brought together fifteen Asia-Pacific economies in the world’s largest free trade agreement, encompassing about 30 per cent of global GDP.10 But even as trade and investment within the region deepen, differences between its legal systems will become more consequential, and the need for legal frameworks that can support cross-border commerce will correspondingly grow.
16. It is in this setting that the Institute’s work assumes even greater importance. The Institute provides a neutral platform on which legal diversity can be studied, areas of common interest identified, and practical means developed to reduce the legal friction that might otherwise impede regional integration.
17. Its work on foreign judgments illustrates this method. The 2017 Judgments Compendium mapped the relevant rules across ASEAN and its major Asia-Pacific trading partners. That work laid the foundation for the Asian Principles for the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments (“Asian Principles”), which distilled thirteen overarching principles across fifteen jurisdictions.11 The sequence captures the Institute’s characteristic method: first, to understand the law as it is; next, to identify the common ground; and finally, to articulate a practical framework for convergence.
18. This work has moved beyond scholarship and entered legal and institutional practice. The Asian Principles have been cited by the Singapore Court of Appeal.12 The project received public support from members of the Supreme People’s Court of China,13 and its materials have been provided to the Council of ASEAN Chief Justices as the Council considers a memorandum of guidance on the recognition and enforcement of foreign money judgments. In other words, ideas first assembled through comparative research are thus beginning to shape the language and practice of transnational justice.
19. The same practice-oriented approach is evident elsewhere. The Institute and the International Insolvency Institute convened almost eighty contributors for a comparative study of restructuring regimes across sixteen Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, and followed this with practical guides on small-enterprise insolvency and out-of-court workouts.14
20. The practical reach of the Institute’s work is even clearer in the fields of data and the digital economy. This is illustrated by the fact that the Data Privacy Compendium was referred to by the Supreme Court of India in the Aadhaar litigation, one of the most consequential examinations of data, identity and privacy in the region. The Institute has also developed a Singapore-China Joint Data Compliance Guide with the Shenzhen Data Exchange.15
21. The Institute was also commissioned to undertake the ASEAN Framework on Cross-border Cloud Computing project. Proposed by Malaysia and approved by ASEAN, the project involved extensive consultation with public and private sector stakeholders, including through workshops held under the auspices of the ASEAN Secretariat. It produced three deliverables: a proposal for a Trusted Data Corridor; a study on the protection of exported data in cloud-services delivery; and a set of principles for trusted cross-border cloud computing. All three deliverables were endorsed at the 6th ASEAN Digital Ministers’ Meeting in January this year.16 In this way, the Institute has moved beyond mapping the law to helping shape the regional policy frameworks within which future law and practice may develop.
22. ABLI has also built and sustained relationships with the three principal international institutions concerned with private law harmonisation: the HCCH, UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT. These relationships create channels in both directions, enabling Asian experience to inform international standard-setting, while promoting greater regional understanding of international instruments. That two-way exchange is vital. Asia should not merely receive legal models developed elsewhere, nor should international standards be formulated without adequate regard to the circumstances and developments of this region. Convergence must be a conversation, not a one-way transmission.
23. The deeper measure of ABLI’s success is therefore not simply the volume of its publications, important though its scholarship has been. Over the past decade, what it has done is to build something less visible but no less valuable: a method, a network and a habit of cooperation. Comparative mapping, broad consultation and practical recommendations are now underpinned by relationships spanning courts, governments, practitioners, businesses, academics and international organisations. That institutional capital positions the Institute well to address the next generation of cross-border legal problems.
IV. Looking ahead: AI and international commerce
24. Among the most pressing of these will be the impact of artificial intelligence on commercial life. The technology is developing and moving across borders faster than the legal frameworks needed to govern its commercial use. AI is already used to analyse markets, draft documents and identify legal risk. As these systems become more capable, they will shape not only how businesses implement decisions, but also how those decisions are made. And this raises novel questions across corporate law, contract and data governance.
25. Consider corporate governance and directors’ duties. Directors must act in good faith in the company’s interests, and exercise reasonable care, skill and diligence. But these principles were developed in a world in which information was gathered, risks assessed and judgments exercised through distinctly and even exclusively human processes. Intelligent systems are now becoming part of the processes by which companies and individuals gather information and make decisions.
26. What does reasonable care require of a director who relies on an AI-generated recommendation? How much must the director understand about the model, its training data and its limitations? And where a system is supplied by an external vendor, how should responsibility be allocated between directors, management and the technology provider? Questions like these are no longer entirely hypothetical. In a recent Delaware case, the chief executive of a corporate acquirer consulted ChatGPT in developing a strategy to assume operational control of the acquired business, and the Court found that the company subsequently followed most of ChatGPT’s recommendations.17 Although the opinion concerned contractual rights and remedies rather than directors’ duties, it illustrates how AI-generated advice is already entering corporate decision-making.
27. And the difficulty is compounded by the structure of modern enterprise. A company may be incorporated in one jurisdiction, listed in another, draw training data from several more, and deploy a system designed, hosted and updated elsewhere. A failure may therefore engage different rules on directors’ duties, contractual responsibility, data protection, disclosure and evidence. If those rules develop without reference to one another, businesses may face not only different answers, but uncertainty about which legal system is to supply the answer at all.
28. The Institute is especially well placed to help address these issues. Its projects demonstrate an ability to work across doctrinal and jurisdictional boundaries, while its comparative, polycentric and practice-oriented method enables it to bring together courts, regulators, practitioners, businesses, technologists and academics. That combination matters because the questions raised by AI cannot be answered by lawyers, technologists or regulators acting alone. They require legal principles to be informed by the capabilities and limitations of the technology, as well as by the realities of commercial life and practice.
29. A useful starting point would be to map how jurisdictions across Asia are responding to these emerging issues. The Institute might then develop common principles or practical guidance on matters such as due diligence, human oversight, data governance, incident reporting and the documentation of AI-assisted decisions. To be clear, the task is not to write a single code for all of Asia. It is to develop a sufficiently shared legal grammar so that businesses, courts and regulators can understand one another. That would preserve accountability, predictability and trust while allowing beneficial innovation to proceed. It is precisely the kind of challenge for which the Institute was created.
V. Conclusion
30. Ten years ago, the Institute was founded because the internationalisation of commerce had outpaced the development of the legal frameworks needed to support it. The world has since become less certain, but not less connected. Geopolitical fragmentation, digitalisation and artificial intelligence have made the need for reliable bridges between legal systems more urgent than ever.
31. The Institute has shown that such bridges are built patiently: by understanding legal differences; by bringing the right communities into conversation; and by translating research into tools that courts, governments and businesses can use. None of this would have been possible without the many individuals who have given generously of their time, expertise and support. I wish today especially to acknowledge Justice Kannan Ramesh, who now chairs the Board of Governors; Professor Yeo Tiong Min, who helped guide the Institute’s academic work in earlier days and continues to be a member of its Advisory Board; and Mark Fisher and Catherine Shen, whose dedication and sustained efforts have carried the Institute’s work forward from day to day.
32. I also express my deep appreciation to the present and former members of the Board of Governors and the Advisory Board; to all those who have worked at the Institute over the years; to those whose vision and support made the establishment of the Institute possible, including its Founding Partners and the Singapore Academy of Law; and to the many project leads, jurisdictional reporters, contributors and institutional partners across Asia and beyond. It is especially heartening to see so many of them gathered here today to mark this important milestone with us. Together, they have built not only a body of valuable scholarship, but also a community committed to the idea that legal diversity need not be an obstacle to cooperation and to commerce.
33. As we celebrate this anniversary, we may look back with gratitude and forward with confidence. The next decade will surely bring problems that are more complex and more deeply transnational than those with which the Institute began. But the Institute has demonstrated what patient research, open dialogue and practical collaboration can achieve. I warmly congratulate everyone who has contributed to its first ten years. May the Institute continue to build the bridges that Asia, and an increasingly divided world, will need in the years ahead. Thank you very much.
(1) Sundaresh Menon CJ, “Doing Business Across Asia: Legal Convergence in an Asian Century” (“2016 ABLI Opening Address”), available at https://www.judiciary.gov.sg/docs/default-source/news-docs/doing-business-across-asia---legal-convergence-in-an-asian-century-final-version-after-delivery--260116.pdf at paras 1 to 3.
(2) 2016 ABLI Opening Address at paras 3 and 6.
(3) 2016 ABLI Opening Address at paras 5 and 6.
(4) 2016 ABLI Opening Address at para 4.
(5) 2016 ABLI Opening Address at paras 15 and 16.
(6) 2016 ABLI Opening Address at paras 20 and 27 to 30.
(7) UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), “Key statistics and trends in international trade 2025: Geoeconomic forces influence the dynamics of international trade”, available at https://unctad.org/publication/key-statistics-and-trends-international-trade-2025.
(8) United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, “UNCITRAL Model Law on Automated Contracting”, available at https://uncitral.un.org/en/mlac.
(9) S Iswaran, “Opening Remarks at FTA Day 2022: ‘Redefining Trade Agreements for a Competitive, Digital and Sustainable Future’”, available at https://www.mti.gov.sg/newsroom/opening-remarks-by-minister-s-iswaran-at-fta-day-2022---redefining-trade-agreements-for-a-competitive--digital-and-sustainable-future/ at para 12.
(10) Ministry of Trade and Industry Singapore, “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)”, available at https://www.mti.gov.sg/trade-international-economic-relations/agreements/free-trade-agreements-fta/rcep/.
(11) Asian Business Law Institute, “Asian Principles for the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments”, available at https://abli.asia/abli-projects/asian-principles-for-the-recognition-and-enforcement-of-foreign-judgments/.
(12) Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp (formerly known as Merck & Co, Inc) v Merck KGaA (formerly known as E Merck) [2021] 1 SLR 1102 at [39].
(13) The project was publicly endorsed by China’s Supreme People’s Court by the Honourable Justices Zhang Yongjian and Yang Lei in an article titled New Exploration on Mutual Recognition and Enforcement of Civil and Commercial Judgments by Judicial Organs (司法机关相互承认执行民商事判决的新探索) in the People's Judicature (人民司法) (No. 13, 2019).
(14) Asian Business Law Institute, “Asian Principles of Business Restructuring”, available at https://abli.asia/abli-projects/asian-principles-of-business-restructuring/.
(15) Asian Business Law Institute and Shenzhen Data Exchange, “Singapore-China Joint Data Compliance Guide: Practical Handbook”, available at https://abli.asia/abli-publications/data-compliance-practice-guide-china-singapore-chapter/.
(16) Asian Business Law Institute, “Principles of ASEAN Framework on Cross-border Cloud Computing”, available at https://abli.asia/abli-publications/principles-of-asean-framework-on-crossb-border-cloud-computing/.
(17) Fortis Advisors, LLC v Krafton, Inc, C.A. No. 2025-0805-LWW.
2026/08/26
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