[DRAFT] Awards Act

Awards Act - Legislative Proposal: Legal Code

Good morning, afternoon, or whatever time of day it happens to be for you. I'm Cretox, bloc patriot and Minister of Military Affairs. This bill would create three official regional honors of The North Pacific: the Grand Order of The North Pacific for exceptional overall service, the Medal of Valor for exceptional military service, and the distinction of Honored Delegate for exceptional former Delegates.. These honors would be awarded by Regional Assembly majority, and would have accompanying statements on the nominee. I think we'll naturally have a tradition of the Delegate and other executive officials taking point on motioning for these awards, but the Executive would be explicitly responsible for maintaining threads on these honors.

In case you're wondering why we should bother having these formal RA-confirmed awards in the Legal Code rather than just using our current informal discretionary system, there are a few advantages. Our current awards inherently have limited weight due to their discretionary nature. Awarding someone a formal regional honor by RA vote, especially with an accompanying statement and prominently displayed in a thread, sends a message that the recipient provided exceptional service to TNP. It's a way of recognizing members of the region who may not be quite at the level of warranting a Security Council badge in a way that would make passing such a C/C for them easier down the line. It also has cultural value: who doesn't love a fun RA vote where we come together to support each other?

Awards Act:

A new Section 9.2 of the Legal Code will be added as follows:

9.2: Awards and Honors:

7. The Regional Assembly may award the Grand Order of The North Pacific (GO) to any resident of The North Pacific by majority vote.
8. The Regional Assembly may award the Medal of Valor (MV) to any current or former member of The North Pacific's military by majority vote.
9. The Regional Assembly may award the distinction of Honored Delegate (HD) to any former Delegate of The North Pacific by majority vote.
10. The three aforementioned honors ("regional honors") must be awarded with an accompanying statement. The Regional Assembly may amend an accompanying statement by majority vote.
11. The Regional Assembly may revoke awarded regional honors by majority vote.
12. This section does not forbid the creation, awarding, or revocation of other distinct honors.

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Hmmm… looks good! Full support.

I would like to vote on who gets an award or not :3

Existing holders of the discretionary Executive-issued Order of Polaris will cease to have it upon passage of this Act.

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Why?

Just because you want to create an award by statute with the same name is no reason to strip an existing award from its recipients.

I also wonder why the Order of Polaris can only be awarded once, especially when the Medal of Honour can explicitly be awarded multiple times.

I like the idea, but "Medal of Honor" sounds too American. Perhaps something more TNP themed.

On a sidenote, shouldn't there be something related to the RMB awards? It could fit somewhere around Section 12: "The Executive may create, award, and revoke additional distinct honors at its discretion."

Blue Wolf II:

I like the idea, but "Medal of Honor" sounds too American. Perhaps something more TNP themed.

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Medal of Manumission?

Corresponds to our regional day, and it's alliterative.

Order of Thel D'Ran?

Lucien Mounier:

Just because you want to create an award by statute with the same name is no reason to strip an existing award from its recipients.

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I think it's fine because I'm working on a Delegate Directive that can tackle this issue by simply replacing the medal that they got with a different, more relevant one.

Also, perhaps we can call it the Medal of Valour?

Additionally, I would like to propose the idea of establishing an "Honoured Citizen" status. I came across a similar concept in Europeia, and I quite like it. I'm not sure how popular the idea of granting people citizenship status that cannot be revoked, except in cases of court sentences, would be, but I wanted to share it just in case it sparks some interest. Perhaps it could be tied in to something I'm planning on introducing in the Delegate Directive.

Medal of Ruben

Halsoni:

Additionally, I would like to propose the idea of establishing an "Honoured Citizen" status. I came across a similar concept in Europeia, and I quite like it. I'm not sure how popular the idea of granting people citizenship status that cannot be revoked, except in cases of court sentences, would be, but I wanted to share it just in case it sparks some interest

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Massively against this - irrevocable citizenship shouldn't be given for past service. And given the people Europeia elevates to "Honoured Citizen" status, I'm not sure that's who we want to be emulating anyway.

I think permanent citizenship is a bit dubious because it locks electoral power in the hands of retired players; those players may have contributed a lot to the region, but at the end of the day our government needs to serve the will of the actually active community. There's also the question of history - not to make this about Europeia, because it's not really relevant, but we've been around for a lot longer than them, and we'd also be introducing this at a much later stage of our history than they did (2010 - three years after Europeia was founded.) Consequently, there's a long list of non-citizens who are arguably deserving of this honour, but how would we decide, and how would it actually work logistically to hand it out to people who have been inactive for years?

Fair enough, fair enough.

Full Support for this. However I feel the current recipients of the Order of Polaris should keep their award even if the act passes and I wouldn’t be against whatsoever to the Order of Polaris being awarded multiple times.

Thank you for your comments. Based on them and talking to @Halsoni, I've made the following changes:

• Changed the Order of Polaris to the Grand Order of The North Pacific, to avoid conflict with an existing Delegate-issued award with current holders just for the sake of a name.
• Changed the Medal of Honor to the Medal of Valor to make it less "American."
• Added an Honored Delegate distinction, for an additional bit of pageantry and a different spin on the Honored Citizen idea. I didn't include a portrait requirement to avoid overcomplicating things.
• Consolidated subsequent references to award names as "regional honors."
• Removed the clause legally requiring the exec to maintain lists of recipients for being unnecessary micromanagement.
• Expanded the clause expressly allowing other awards beyond just ones issued by the exec.

I'll let this sit for a bit before motioning it to vote. If Honored Delegate somehow turns out to be controversial, I'll just split that off into a separate bill.

Looks good to me. I look forward to proposing JAL as our region's first Honoured Delegate.

Looks good to me!