[R4R] Citizenship admin checks

1. What law, government policy, or action (taken by a government official) do you request that the Court review?

The process used by admins to check members requesting citizenship, both generally (hereafter referred to as "i") and in the specific case of my own application (hereafter referred to as "ii").

In i, I challenge the requirement admins seem to have taken upon themselves to enforce that members must not be using work or other non-home connections.
This is based on the apparent requirement the admins are enforcing that members requesting citizenship cannot be using work connections, which is not a requirement in law. The only legal requirement is that members are not using proxies, which is not synonymous with using a work or other non-home (eg coffee shop) internet connection.

In ii, I challenge the denial of my citizenship application on the grounds that an admin believes I am using a company network connection.
As expanded on in section 6, I am not using a company connection, but my home network, and so even if the requirement to use a home network (challenged in i) is legal, my request should not be rejected.

2. What portions of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Legal Code, or other legal document do you believe has been violated by the above? How so?

Section 6.1: Citizenship Applications
2. Any resident may apply for citizenship using their regional forum account, by providing the name of their nation in The North Pacific, and swearing an oath as follows:
[removed]
5. Forum administration will have 14 days to evaluate the citizenship applicant and verify that they are not using a proxy or evading a judicially-imposed penalty. The Vice Delegate will have 7 days to perform a security evaluation and pass or fail the applicant. The Vice Delegate must consult the Security Council if there is reasonable concern as to whether an applicant should be admitted.
6. The Speaker will reject applicants who fail an evaluation by either forum administration or the Vice Delegate.
[removed]
9. The Speaker will accept all other applicants with valid applications.
10. The Speaker will process applications within 14 days. If an applicant has not been approved or rejected within that time, they will be automatically granted citizenship.

Click to expand...

Emphasis added. See above for my reasoning on how the bold text has been breached.

3. Are there any prior rulings of the Court that support your request for review? Which ones, and how?

None that I am aware of.

4. Please establish your standing by detailing how you, personally, have been adversely affected. If you are requesting a review of a governmental action, you must include how any rights or freedoms of yours have been violated.

My request for citizenship has been denied by an admin as they say I have failed the admin check. It is (wrongly) claimed that I am using a company network connection.

5. Is there a compelling regional interest in resolving your request? If so, explain why it is in the interest of the region as whole for your request to be decided now.

It is possible the admins are wrongly and arbitrarily rejecting applications for citizenship, either unlawfully (i) or based on innaccuracies (ii).
On a more personal note, I'm a new nation, formed a few days ago, but on my first day of existence I completed the endorsements needed to be a keeper of the north, and I'm currently one of a very few nations to have endorsed every nation in the North Pacific. There is therefore a risk that players who would be otherwise heavily engaged (as I would plan to be, but for my application for citizenship being unlawfully rejected) are denied citizenship and simply choose to move elsewhere, to another region, to the North Pacific's detriment.

6. Do you have any further information you wish to submit to the Court with your request?

It is claimed that I am using a company network connection because of this, https://whatismyipaddress.com/, which says my IP is "corporate". This website is not omniscient, is not immune from being wrong, and most importantly - is not an official or authoratitive source of data on network connections. I have a leased line connection, which this website records as corporate. It is in truth a domestic connection, at my home. I also feel the need to add that, simply, this isn't actually how IP addresses work - there is no globally definitive list of corporate and domestic IP addresses.

I may not involve myself in security checks any longer, but I have some knowledge of how we've done things and why that I can share.

Historically, this practice is based on the incident when JAL joined on a second account as Bokeryville using his workplace internet connection.

There is no perfect approach here because as you rightly say Internet Protocol addresses were not designed for this purpose. The increasing prevalence of wireless internet provision is a particular challenge. We do our best to offer as close to a guarantee that we can that people aren't able to get multiple citizenships past us.

TNP Courts have never before taken up TNP forum administration or moderation policies and as a community we have generally considered administration and moderation to be entirely separate affairs from the regional government. Further, our administrators do not reveal all of the means they use for the regular citizenship security checks. If we did, it would be a recipe for how to evade them.

Thanks Elu, but while I don't think that was exactly a brief in the sense of the rules for R4Rs, I would like to ask that all input, briefs or general arguments/opinions, be saved for after the Court decides to accept the R4R. You might just save yourself some time.

With that said, the Court is mulling this over and we'll let you know soon if we're going to move forward with this or not.

The Court declines to review the matter presented to it. The following is an explanation why (which shall not be considered binding precedent):

The powers of the Court are clearly enumerated in Article 4(1) of the Constitution: “The Court will try all criminal cases and review the constitutionality of laws or legality of government policies and actions” [emphasis mine]. This request does not fit this description.

In this request, we're requested to review two things:
A. The decision made by an administrator to 'fail' the admininstrators' check of @libvillia.
B. The policy of administrators to 'fail' citizenship applicants that use a corporate network.
(Note that the order is reversed here compared to the request above.)

We cannot review A because it involves an administrator action, which is not considered a government action under the Constitution (see, eg, Article 6(2) of the Constitution). Therefore, it falls outside the scope of the Court's powers.

We also cannot review B, because it concerns administrator policy (not government policy). Under Legal Code Sect. 6.1, clause 5, the administrators are tasked with “verify[ing] that [applicants] are not using a proxy or evading a judicially-imposed penalty.” The Legal Code does not specify what policy the administrators should use in verifying that a judicially-imposed penalty is not being evaded, a matter that is consequently set out in administrator policy. Given that the procedure for verifying this information—including the requirement that a home network be used—is administrator policy, we cannot review it.

It's important to note that this decision does not take away, in any sense, the powers of the RA, including the ability to further regulate administrator checks.[1] It does mean, however, that at present such decisions are administrator policy, and as such they cannot be reviewed by the Courts under the present terms of the Constitution.

Lady Raven Wing, J, would have accepted review of question A.

[1] At present, the administrator check is mandated by the Legal Code and the RA has explicitly stated the purpose thereof. Thereby it already regulates the checks, though it leaves a large part of the process up to administrator policy.