SINGAPORE, Nov. 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — The 12th Meeting of the Council of ASEAN Chief Justices (CACJ) took place on 15 November 2025, hosted by the Supreme Court of Singapore. The meeting concluded a series of sideline events on 13 and 14 November 2025 jointly organised by the CACJ and the ASEAN Law Association.
The 10 ASEAN Chief Justices and Heads of Delegation at the signing of the Singapore Declaration
At the meeting, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon of Singapore was elected to be the Chair of the CACJ for the third time. The meeting also welcomed a delegation from Timor-Leste as observers following the country’s accession as ASEAN’s 11th member in October 2025.
On 14 November 2025, a consensus was reached in the adoption of the Model Framework for Court Communication in Cross-Border Insolvency Proceedings among ASEAN judiciaries (Model Framework). The Model Framework promotes cross-court communication in such matters by encouraging each ASEAN judiciary to voluntarily adopt the framework and designate a point of liaison to facilitate court-to-court communication.
On the same day, the Supreme Court of Singapore and the Supreme Court of the Philippines signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to Enhance Cross-Border Communications in Cross-Border Insolvency Proceedings. The MOU formalises judicial communication and coordination between both courts to manage insolvency and restructuring proceedings more efficiently and promptly.
Additionally, the ASEAN insolvency judges and intellectual property (IP) judges held two separate meetings and panel discussions with practitioners in their respective fields, with the insolvency session covering economic and geopolitical impacts on insolvency and restructuring matters, judgment recognition challenges, and regional judicial communication benefits. The IP session examined generative artificial intelligence’s challenges to patent and copyright law, jurisdictional complexities, governance developments, and alternative dispute resolution for cross-border IP disputes.
All Chief Justices and Heads of Delegations in attendance signed the Singapore Declaration at the close of the CACJ meeting, maintaining the tradition of recording CACJ decisions through publicly available declarations since 2015. More information on CACJ can be found here.
