Coercive Consent: The Law in Some Asean Jurisdictions

The idea that voluntariness is at the heart of all self-assumed obligations is perhaps the undeniable hallmark of every developed legal system. Hence, virtually all legal systems place great emphasis on the need to establish the voluntariness of consent in contracts, being as they are, a species of voluntarily assumed obligations. Indeed, in virtually all developed legal systems specific rules have been evolved and formulated to give effect to the notion of free consent. However, even if the need and desire for consent to be voluntary and unencumbered by any vitiating factor is generally universal, what constitutes a factor having the effect of vitiating the freeness of a consent is undoubtedly less universal and more inclined to be a function of both culture and religion. This article will attempt to discuss and compare the varied notions of free consent in the different legal systems of some selected ASEAN countries from the perspective of the impact of coercion on consent. It will eventually become apparent that the deep-seated legal tradition that most of these ASEAN countries inherited from their colonial past is now undergoing a gradual transformation, in particular actuated and greatly animated by the need to re-examine and re-evaluate existing rules to make them relevant to popular and indigenous norms and value systems.