The separation of French administrative courts and French administrative judges from the ordinary courts and judges predates the Revolution. As the activities of the public administration have grown, so has litigation against it. This has led to an increasing diversity of administrative courts and a narrowing of the judicial role of the Conseil d’Etat principally to questions of law. The Conseil d’Etat continues to perform a consultative role in providing legal advice to the government, especially on legislation. It also has a supervisory role over the work of other administrative courts. The background of members of the Conseil d’Etat is less legal than that of the lower administrative courts and their career path is more diverse, going well beyond judicial functions. These features are distinctive compared with administrative judiciaries in other countries.

An administrative code and a national framework of administrative courts was established under the 1997 Constitution but the origins of the contemporary system of administrative justice in Thailand go back to well over a century earlier. This essay will consider the relationship between the emergence of a relatively centralised state in the nineteenth century and the provision of an identifiable system of administrative law in Thailand. It will be argued that the episodic development of administrative justice can be related to a range of diverse elements including: the initial foundation of the Council of State during the reign King Rama V; an interest in European law and legal systems; the recognition of a principle of legality under the influence of Pridi Banomyong as part of a transition from absolute to monarchy to constitutional monarchy; the impact of the Council of State Act of 1933, which led to the establishment of a Petitioning Council under the Thai Council of State to handle grievances and provide remedies for Thai citizens.

This chapter looks at legal certainty in Indonesia’s administrative courts. It provides a brief overview of the genesis and development of this branch of the Indonesian judiciary and then shifts its focus to how administrative court judges interpret and apply so-called ‘general principles of proper administration’ (hereafter ‘General Principles’). These principles are one of the two grounds for which administrative courts can review administrative decrees, the other ground being the violation of a statute or regulation. The choice of these principles as a way of discussing legal certainty is deliberate: from the start of the administrative court system, it was the intention of the legislator and the Supreme Court to develop these principles by means of judicial precedent. This is highly unusual in Indonesian legal practice, where legislative and executive lawmaking have always been dominant and little space is left for judge-made law. In other words, if ever there has been a field of law in Indonesia in which the judiciary is well-positioned to take the lead in developing consistent legal rules, it is in this one. Despite positive developments in the conditions for consistent interpretation, this objective has not been achieved yet – although the situation is better than in the civil and criminal courts.