Ruling of the Court of The North Pacific
In regards to the Judicial Inquiry filed by Picairn on the Reconsideration of Endorsement Count Requirements and the Solicitation of Endorsements
Opinion drafted by Chief Justice Pallaith, joined by Justice Skaraborg and THO Chipoli
The Court took into consideration the inquiry filed
here by Picairn.
The Court took into consideration the relevant portion of the Bill of Rights of The North Pacific.
4. No Nation of The North Pacific and its territories holding WA member status in NationStates shall be obligated to endorse any official of a government authority of the region and its territories. The right to add an endorsement or withdraw an endorsement is a sovereign right of that Nation as a WA member.
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9. Each Nation in The North Pacific and its territories is guaranteed the organization and operation of the governmental authorities of the region and its territories on fundamental principles of democracy, accountability, and transparency. No action by the governmental authorities of the region and its territories shall deny to any Nation of The North Pacific and its territories, due process of law, including prior notice and the opportunity to be heard, nor deny to any Nation of The North Pacific and its territories the equal and fair treatment and protection of the provisions of the Constitution.
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11. No governmental authority of the region and its territories has the power to suspend or disregard the Constitution or the Legal Code. In the event of an actual emergency, the governmental authorities of the region and its territories, with the express consent of the Nations of the region and its territories or their representatives, is authorized to act in any reasonable manner that is consistent as practicable with the pertinent provisions of the Constitution.
The Court took into consideration the relevant portion of the Legal Code of The North Pacific.
Chapter 1: Criminal Code
Section 1.11: Forswearing
20. “Forswearing” is defined as the violation of an individual’s legally mandated sworn oath, either willfully or through negligence.
Chapter 5: Regional Security Law
Section 5.1: Requirements and Admission
6. The influence requirement is a Soft Power Disbursement Rating within The North Pacific greater than or equal to 65% of the WA Delegate's endorsements multiplied by 360. The endorsement requirement is greater than or equal to 65% of the WA Delegate's endorsement count.
Section 5.2: The Delegate and Vice Delegate
9. The Vice Delegate is responsible for maintaining an endorsement count at least that of 90 per cent of the WA Delegate's endorsement count. Frontier Vice Delegates are responsible for maintaining an endorsement count at least that of 70 per cent of the Frontier WA Delegate’s endorsement count in their respective territories of The North Pacific.
10. If the Delegate or Vice Delegate, or the Frontier Delegate or Frontier Vice Delegate, is below this level, they must promptly act to gather sufficient endorsements to meet or exceed the requirement.
Section 5.4: Reckless Endorsement Gathering
22. The Serving Delegate may eject or ban any nation in The North Pacific for reckless endorsement gathering that meets all of the following criteria:
• It is not in the Council or holding the office of Delegate or Vice Delegate.
• It has been reported to the Delegate as a possible threat to regional security by the Council.
• It has continued actively gathering endorsements after two warnings against gathering endorsements sent at least two days apart from each other.
• It has more endorsements than 80 per cent of the WA Delegate's endorsement level.
23. The Serving Delegate may eject or ban any nation in The North Pacific for reckless endorsement gathering that exceeds 85 per cent of the WA Delegate's endorsement level.
Section 5.5: Endorsement Campaigns
29. The Serving Delegate may eject or ban any nation in The North Pacific for solicitation of nations to unendorse government officials or endorse nations that meets all of the following criteria:
• It is not in the Council or holding the office of Delegate or Vice Delegate.
• It has been reported to the Delegate as a possible threat to regional security by the Council.
• It has continued to actively solicit unendorsement of the Delegate, Vice Delegate, or members of the Council, or refuses to cooperate in reversing its solicitations or assist in recovering endorsements after being warned by the Council; or it has continued to actively solicit endorsement of a nation so that it will have more endorsements than the Delegate, Vice Delegate, or members of the Council, or refuses to cooperate in reversing its solicitations or assist in lowering endorsements after being warned by the Council.
Chapter 6: Regional Assembly Statutes
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 or one of its territories, and swearing an oath as follows:
I pledge loyalty to The North Pacific and its territories, obedience to her laws, and responsible action as a member of her society. I pledge to only register one nation to vote in The North Pacific. I pledge that no nation under my control will wage war against the North Pacific and its territories. I understand that if I break this oath I may permanently lose my voting privileges. In this manner, I petition the Speaker for citizenship in The North Pacific.
The Court took into consideration prior rulings by the Court
here,
here,
here,
here, and
here.
The Court opines the following:
On Standing
The petitioner is the Court Examiner, and enjoys universal standing for all questions before this Court. There is no question of proper standing in this case.
On the Court’s Prior Ruling
The Court previously fielded a series of questions related to the Vice Delegate and how its gathering and maintenance of endorsements related to the requirements of the legal code, and whether a Vice Delegate who fails to maintain the second highest number of endorsements, and a Delegate exercising discretion not to eject some nations but ban others in order to keep the Vice Delegate in second place violated the Bill of Rights. The essence of our conclusion was that none of the legal code provisions related to these matters alone would indicate either government official was violating the law, but that
how they went about gathering endorsements or ejecting nations would be how criminal charges were determined. That remains true. The portion of the law concerning security and endorsements has changed since this ruling was made, including the exact number of endorsements the Vice Delegate is required to have, and the provision that would have removed the Vice Delegate from office for having to perform.
The old clause 24, requiring the “Security Council Law” to be applied in a reasonable manner, was cited quite a bit and the Court relied upon it extensively in forming its opinion about reasonable enforcement of the law and when determining discretion for the Delegate, but of course this clause was subsequently removed when the legal code was amended. When it comes to the Bill of Rights and its application in ejecting nations, the Regional Assembly expanded the original clause 21, creating a multi-pronged process for ejecting nations that is much more detailed than the original clause. This change lives up to our original ruling and establishes a reasonable process for ejections, while allowing for the kind of discretion that allows officials to apply the law more leniently or harshly depending on the scenario facing them.
While the reference to these modified clauses would render these aspects of the original decision defunct, the original questions were correctly decided, especially the aspect of a requirement that these officials act in a reasonable manner. The Court also answered a few of the questions correctly, if not glibly, but the law has changed sufficiently that we now must examine them a bit more closely. These questions are concerned with whether it is a crime for a person to have more endorsements than the Vice Delegate or to do any thing which would cause the Vice Delegate to not have the second most endorsements.
On Endorsement Count Requirements and the Solicitation of Endorsements
The Court was previously not prepared to indulge the question of whether it was a crime to do “any thing” which would cause the Vice Delegate to not have the second most endorsements in the region, deeming it too broad to answer, but the Regional Assembly has since seen fit to explore this question at greater length and we must now consider this in reviewing that new law’s impact on these questions. Simply having more endorsements than the Vice Delegate, and the Vice Delegate not being the person with the second highest number of endorsements, are not crimes, just as the original ruling states. In that original ruling we also considered that there may be certain scenarios where the Vice Delegate is violating their oath of office by not being the person with the second highest number of endorsements, but that such a scenario could still constitute a violation of their oath, and therefore a crime, depending on the actions of the individual in question. Previously the Court reiterated that endorsing another nation cannot be a crime due to the Bill of Rights enshrining the right to exchange endorsements, and therefore taking action to put another nation over the Vice Delegate in endorsements would not be a crime. However, this isn’t actually true. The Bill of Rights grants residents the right to “add an endorsement or withdraw an endorsement,” which is clear enough as it goes. But this right does not guarantee residents’ rights to campaign on behalf of another nation and seek to increase that nation’s endorsements with the cooperation of other nations, or to have them removed from one of the Delegate, Vice Delegate, or member of the Security Council. Every nation that responds to such a campaign would be exercising their individual rights under the Bill of Rights to grant or remove their endorsement, which is their sovereign right, but the campaigning itself conducted by the campaigner who spurred them to action is not protected by that sovereign right.
In recent years the region saw endorsement campaigns conducted by enemies of the region during a time of war, explicitly to disrupt the region’s normal transition process. Prior to these events, the law did not contemplate such campaigns as explicitly actionable by the Security Council, but in the years since the original ruling, the Regional Assembly expanded on the security law and outlined at least two scenarios where gathering or exchanging endorsements may be problematic, and give rise to actionable ejection from the region: endorsement campaigns to unendorse the Delegate, Vice Delegate, or members of the Security Council; and campaigns to solicit endorsements for a nation to put it over the Delegate, Vice Delegate, or members of the Security Council. These provisions also require a series of formal warnings and having been reported to the Delegate as a potential threat, while the solicitors are not themselves on the Security Council or in the office of Vice Delegate or Delegate. In that regard, the newer language is consistent with our prior ruling, and provides reasonable and measured processes before simply allowing ejection as a first cause. And these provisions are in the Security Council chapter of the legal code, not the criminal code. These activities would still not constitute a crime. But this does not mean there is no scenario where a crime could have occurred when such action was taken.
Strictly speaking, such activity would fall under freedom of speech, which we have seen previously is subject to certain limits. And given these limits exist, it is also not necessarily the case that seeking endorsements for one’s own nation is without consequences when done inappropriately. The notion of Reckless Endorsement Gathering is not a new one, and the law that we evaluate again today establishes a multi-pronged process for security officials to utilize when responding to such campaigns, similar in structure to the new one for ejecting nations. But the criminal code does not explicitly criminalize such behavior. In our original ruling, the Court made the trite observation that “Reckless Endorsement Gathering is cause for ejection but not a crime” and that “Gross Misconduct is a crime but not cause for ejection.” They did allow for the fact that a citizens could “conceivably commit Gross Misconduct by violating their oath as a citizen in egregious cases of Reckless Endorsement Gathering” but seemed to consider these two observations to contradict each other and require no further action or conclusion. Obviously, they do not contradict. Whether or not a security official proceeds with ejecting a citizen for reckless endorsement gathering, that is not the crime the citizen would be charged with as it is not in the criminal code, and if there is a crime that citizen can be charged with instead, that is the one that would respond to the fact they hold the second highest endorsed spot in the region. The Court identified Gross Misconduct as the likely crime that would be committed by such an occurrence, and in a high profile instance of this crime being charged against a citizen, we explored the question in greater depth.
We have previously identified in our decision
On Vague Laws and Responsible Action (a decision which looked to the very ruling we are reviewing here in forming its conclusion) that the oath every citizen takes, specifically concerning “responsible action,” is violated in relation to the crime of Gross Misconduct when the conduct in question would be considered “obviously and seriously irresponsible” by a reasonable citizen. We find this to be a sensible standard, but would note that that level of serious irresponsibility does not necessitate a crime as showy or grandiose as Gross Misconduct. That serious irresponsibility is what violates the law, not a “gross” offense as so labeled by the criminal code, and does not necessarily require the highest level of punishment in the event of a conviction. There may be extreme instances of soliciting endorsements, either what is understood to be Reckless Endorsement Gathering or one of the newer endorsement campaigns, which can be deemed to be violations of a citizen’s oath. Reasonable citizens would easily see a concerted effort to supplant security officials or the elected Vice Delegate and Delegate and conclude that such action was “seriously irresponsible.” And such action could also be easily distinguished from an overzealous nation seeking endorsements, especially one who has been warned by the Security Council.
We rely on the existing reasonable processes currently present in the region’s security law, and reiterate that regardless of the loss of the original clause specifying a “reasonable manner” in applying the security law, such law should be applied reasonably as required by the Bill of Rights. There is already a high standard for applying this law, and it still remains the case that simply having more endorsements than the Vice Delegate, or simply pulling an endorsement from the Vice Delegate causing another nation to overtake them in endorsements is not illegal and is a protected action under the Bill of Rights. But there are new provisions in the law and recent history that demonstrate how nuanced such rights can be and how they can quickly run afoul of our security and criminal law. Once again, we strive to tear down explicit and absolute barriers to more complex action on the part of the government to protect the region and respond to new and novel threats.
Holding
We find that the following portion of our prior ruling On Endorsement Count Requirements and the Solicitation of Endorsements is now altered due to being defunct as precedent:
Of specific note are the definition of Gross Misconduct and clauses 5, 6, 19, and 24 of Chapter 5 of the legal code.
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The above statutes would be taken as guidance when considering an accusation of Gross Misconduct against a Vice Delegate.
Specifically, when the Vice Delegate nation were to fail to have more than the smaller of 300 or half the endorsements of the serving Delegate nation for more than 8 days, the Vice Delegate would be removed from office automatically, but when they seek to disregard that or fail to maintain an endorsement level of 75 per cent of the serving Delegate nations' in an "unreasonable" context, they could be committing Gross Misconduct through nonfeasance in office in a gross or excessive manner.
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Please note that when clause 24 was added, Chapter 5 was titled "Security Council Law." The chapter has since been retitled as "Regional Security Law". This leaves room for ambiguity for interpreting the scope of clause 24 - does it only apply to those parts of the chapter that explicitly relate to the Security Council? In this ruling, we hold to the understanding that the clause applies to the entirety of the chapter, lacking clear guidance otherwise.
It would help keep the Court's work consistent if the Regional Assembly were to resolve this ambiguity of language, one way or another.
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Question Five - Is Clause 21 of Chapter 5 of The North Pacific Legal Code, permitting but not requiring the Delegate to eject or ban nations with more endorsements than the Vice Delegate invalid because it violates the Bill of Rights' guarantee of equal protection?
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The use of clause 21 to eject political opponents, nations whose name begins with a particular letter, or in other such ways would violate the bill of rights:
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Furthermore, clause 24 requires that 21 be applied in a "reasonable manner". This can be understood as requiring care to be reasonable when exercising that power of ejection, which conventionally includes "being reasonable" toward others - that is to say, it includes a degree of leniency when possible.
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However, the answers to questions two through five suggest that Lord Ravenclaw did not break the law by declining to eject either Cheongji or Plembobria, that as no claim has been made that Guslantis failed to have at least 75% of the serving Delegate's endorsement count there is no basis presented to consider Bootsie to have committed Gross Misconduct, and that as no case has been made that Plembobria acted irresponsibly there is no basis presented to consider Plembobria to have committed the same.
As the Security law's clause 24 recognizes, achieving exact adherence with the endorsement level mandates is not always practicable. The resolution of such practical questions belongs with the Delegate, Vice Delegate, and Security Council in the first instance. The Court is better placed to review their judgements than to micromanage them in the execution of their core duties. It would be inappropriate to speak further on legality with the actions available for review.
Therefore, the defunct portion of the ruling will be modified with strikethrough tags, acknowledging its obsolescence while preserving it for historical purposes.
We hereby overturn the portion of the same ruling that asserts endorsing a nation cannot be a crime, and that “any thing” is too broad to answer. We find that Reckless Endorsement Gathering and endorsement campaigns can be deemed to violate a citizen’s oath regarding “responsible action” and therefore that in some egregious scenarios, holding the second highest number of endorsements instead of the Vice Delegate or causing the Vice Delegate to not have the second most endorsements in the region can constitute a crime.
On the Court’s Prior Ruling On Vague Laws and Responsible Action
As previously mentioned, the Court considered the possibility of “egregious cases of Reckless Endorsement Gathering” when considering applications of Gross Misconduct when applied to violations of the citizen oath’s pledge for “responsible action,” but unlike in today’s ruling, the Court then opted to assert that “where the conduct could not be criminalized due to being protected by the Bill of Rights, even if it could fall within the above meaning, it is not a violation of the pledge.” This simply cannot be the case.
This Court has as of late been cautious to avoid absolute barriers to legal action in our decisions wherever there have been clear exceptions and application of limits to rights as scheduled under the Bill of Rights. In
On the Regulation of the Regional Message Board we outlined clear instances where the freedom of speech was not absolute and overturned our previous ruling on a sedition law for lacking caution and risking a situation where the government may be “unable to effectively regulate or govern the region when other kinds of harm may be done to the community.” We feel that this same concern applies to
On Vague Laws and Responsible Action, which set up a legal standard for evaluating possible violations of a citizen’s oath that would run afoul of criminal law as applied to extreme solicitation of endorsements, and then declared it off-limits. We see no good reason for this, especially in light of what has occurred in the years since these rulings.
We hereby overturn this portion of the ruling.
On the Application of Updated Criminal Law to the Former Crime of Gross Misconduct
Our conclusions today deal extensively with the application of endorsement behavior to the crime of Gross Misconduct. The Regional Assembly has recently retired that crime from the criminal code, effectively replacing it with four new crimes, including one that adopts the same wording, Forswearing. Practically speaking, our analysis in this review, as far as the old crime of Gross Misconduct goes, applies to the new crime of Forswearing, as both involve violations of a citizen’s oath. And for that reason, the logic of our prior rulings
On Endorsement Count Requirements and the Solicitation of Endorsements and
On Vague Laws and Responsible Action remain sound and the conclusions correct. But these are only two of a great many rulings that explore the crime of Gross Misconduct, either in passing or at length. It would be frivolous to comb through these rulings only to cross out every mention of the word “Gross Misconduct” simply because that crime no longer exists, when its essence remains in the Criminal Code and an identical crime has taken its place. Some of the invocations of Gross Misconduct will refer to what we now understand to be Forswearing, but other applications may more appropriately apply to Malfeasance, Misfeasance, or Nonfeasance.
Rendering rulings defunct is intended to eliminate contradictory conclusions that are no longer applicable in light of new law. We do not believe any of our prior conclusions involving Gross Misconduct would be negated by the recent change in the Criminal Code, though it is always possible that a compelling argument can be made, or a subsequent ruling will reveal that such conclusions are incompatible with modern law. For the most part, we believe that any prior ruling’s reference to Gross Misconduct should be evaluated against the four crimes we named above, as these crimes are understood to be the successor crimes that come from that now-retired one.
If a prior ruling is brought up for review simply on the ground that the crime Gross Misconduct no longer exists, and no other argument is made for why this change in the Legal Code changes our conclusion in that ruling, this Court should deny that request for review.
