Liberty Alliance is drafting a new constitution and we want as many people to contribute as possible. Why is a constitution important? Because it sets out the rules which govern Liberty Alliance (including, but not limited to, what role the Government should play, how they are elected and what they can do - eg when they can kick someone out of the region, etc).

Please feel free to contribute your thoughts here, I will then write a draft and put it to the vote in the Provisional Assembly. The basic model I was thinking about is based on the original Liberty Alliance constitution (which is more or less what the current provisional government is based on). This involves:

- 2 Joint Heads of Region, the elected UN Delegate and the Region Founder who will be the President
- A Council of Ministers, headed by the Prime Minister, including an Immigration Minster, a Defence Minister, an Attorney-General, a Foreign Minister and other ministers, all elected by LA member nations
- A Legislative Assembly where all laws are decided and all member nations can vote.

Here are some particular questions to debate:

Should we include a Bill of Rights in the constitution?

• If so, what rights are important? What do the members of Liberty Alliance value?
• Should the Bill of Rights be binding on nations internal governments (eg prevent or discourage member nations from, say, passing discriminatory laws), or should the Bill of Rights only apply on a regional level (eg prevent the LA Government from unfairly discriminating between nations)?

Should the (unelected) Founder be the President?

• One argument is that this is undemocratic, but at the same time, they did found the region!
• This is not an opportunity to have a go at Balthamos, but rather to debate the merits and disadvantages of having an unelected Head of State (or Region).
• One advantage is that this creates a stable, permanent office which can be responsible for administering the forum, taking emergency action in a crisis, confirming election dates for the elected offices, swearing in Ministers, etc. This would make the office of President very much like that of the Queen of England (or the Governor-General of Australia or New Zealand, etc)

How often should we hold elections?

How should we organise the judiciary (the courts)?

What else should be included in the constitution?


Regards,
QuantumSoft

This post has been edited by Quantumsoft on Nov 15 2005, 08:08 PM

In userite regions such as the Liberty Alliance, I am a firm believer that there are two acceptable ways a userite region can be run.

Firstly, the ASE model of direct democracy. In the Allied States of EuroIslanders, the supreme decision body is the Assembly of Allied States, not a cabinet or the Founder or the UN Delegate. All nations who reside in the ASE are in the Assembly, whether they appear or not. All nations have a equal vote in the Assembly, and the system is Direct Democracy. Committies are formed by a majority vote in the Assembly to run things smoothly. Committees are all non-standing, meaning that they can be dissolved by the Assembly due to inactivity, or their purpose completed. If wanted, I can go into more detail.

Secondly, what Quanumsoft stated, however, without the title of President. As a Joint-Head of Region, I find it personally illogical for it to seem that with the title of President, the Founder have more power than the UN Delegate, especially when the Founder is not elected and the UN Delegate is. The UN Delegate and the Founder should be equal in power, and I believe rewarding the Founder with a fancy title is silly in this case.

I will comment further on this later.

The 'direct democracy' model is interesting because it allows all members to have a say in the day to day running of the region. However, the main problem seems to be that large group bodies can often take a long time to debate issues and make decisions (especially as we would need to wait a reasonable amount of time so that all members who wanted to could log in and comment). This is good for legislative decisions, but sometimes executive and administrative decisions need to be made quickly (eg defence).

A compromise is to keep the original model, but make the cabinet accountable to the Legislative Assembly, so that while the executive can make decisions on their own as needed, these decisions can be questioned and scrutinised in the Legislative Assembly and the minister removed if they lose the confidence of the Assembly. This model ensures that ministers always keep the best interests of LA in mind when they make decisions, and means they have to keep an eye on what nations are saying in the Legislative Assembly because they can be easily removed by the Assembly. This gives all Liberty Alliance members the ability to influence executive decisions, and remove ministers who don't listen, but retains the ability of the executive to respond to incidents quickly and efficiently. By the way, this model is basically the Westminster model of democracy (ie used in the UK, Australia, NZ, Canada, many other Commonwealth countries).

The only major change we would need to make to incorporate this principal of 'responsible government' (ie responsible to the Legislative Assembly), would be to move the elections of ministers to the Legislative Assembly itself. This means making the election of ministers a vote in the Assembly, instead of a separate election. However, as all nations are members of the Legislative Assembly, where all nations have an equal vote, this is really just a change in formality only.

As for the title of President for the Founder, I agree that this gives an appearance of supremacy over the UN Delegate, and that this is not fair given that the Founder is not elected. However, the fact is that in NS, the Founder does have extra power in that they can deny the UN delegate certain powers (I am open to be corrected on this, my source is http://ns.goobergunch.net/wiki/index.php/Founder, not experience). To counter this problem, I suggest making it unconstitutional for the Founder to exercise these extra powers. What do you think? Unless anyone has any counter arguments, I agree that the title of President can be scrapped.

Given that one is elected and the other not, I was thinking that they could have different roles (but I am not quite sure what these roles should be). I agree (now) that neither should be superior to the other, but I would be interested to see what people think of giving them separate roles. The Founder could be more of a ceremonial and administrative position, with the roles of administering the forum, confirming election dates, etc, whereas the UN Delegate, as an elected representative, could be part of the executive, maybe? As always, I am interested to hear your thoughts on this.

QS

Dear All

First of all I would like to apologise for my "extended" absence from Liberty Alliance. It is unknown to many but I have many other responsibilities on Nation-States that unfortunately have been coming before the duties I hold to my own region, but I am aiming to change that.

Now. Onto this constitution, I agree first and foremost that a new constitution for Liberty Alliance would be most beneficial. I also agree that this needs to be an informed decision, hence further discussion like this is very productive and the kind of stuff we need happening. Thank-you to Provisional Attorney-General QuantumSoft for making this happen and Provisional UN Delegate Drinnon for supporting and endorsing this motion.

Personally, I would like to adopt a federal form of government similar to that of Australia and the United States of America. I would most definately like to adopt the separation of powers with an executive branch, legislative branch and furthermore separate judiciary.

The Executive Branch:

My idea is this should be formed of the Head of State (The Founder) UN Delegate, President (Head of Executive Branch), Prime Minister and the Elections Official. These officials are the leaders in our region and appoint positions such as the Justices of our court system etc.

The Legislative Branch:

This branch should consist of two houses. The upper house (Legislative Council) and the lower house (Legislative Assembly) the goal here is to make the Liberty Alliance government responsible to the lower house which ultimately consists of every Liberty Alliance citizen.

All legislation is passed via a "public referendum" in the Legislative Assembly and is proposed by the head of this house "Attorney-General". Furthermore we have the Upper House or the Legislative Council. This should consist of the Prime Minister and his cabinet as well as up to 5 Senators. These officials should vote on specific ministry related changes for example if we are entering foreign relations and a treaty needs to be ratified it is not ratified via a Legislative Assembly vote but limited to the vote of the Legislative Council.

The people of Genosha (Legislative Assembly) elect the members of the Legislative Council.

The Judicial Branch:

Run by the Head Justice who is appointed by the Executive Council merely implements and interprets this constitution.

We definately should have a Bill of Rights. I have a copy of a Bill of Rights from another region I am in association with. I will post it underneath to establish what rights I think are important:

Genoshan Bill of Rights:

How often should we hold elections?

Every 3 months? Thoughts?

Sincerely - Balthamos

Good to have you back Balthamos!

House Keeping
As both the arbitrator of this Constitutional Convention and a contributor, I will attempt to both objectively lead the debate as well as give my own opinion on issues. I will try to be clear as to which I am doing when. All members should be aware that I will draft a constitution based on the majority opinion expressed in this forum, regardless of if it is my opinion or not. However, if I do express an idea and no one else disagrees OR if I say I agree with another members idea and no body else challenges it, then I will take this as general agreement and the idea will most likely to be included in the constitution. To make this clear and easy, I request that members be specific when they are disagreeing with or challenging another members idea.

Federal Structure
I agreed with Balthamos that the Government should follow a federal structure and be made up of three separate divisions, executive, legislative and judicial.

President/Founder/Executive Issues

I am not quite sure what you are suggesting here, is it that the Founder is the Head of State and the executive is also made up of the UN Delegate, the President, the Prime Minister and the Elections Official?

I will wait until this is clarified until I comment further on my ideas for the executive line up, or respond to your ideas.

The Legislative Branch
The original model I proposed included a single house (unicameral) legislative structure. Balthamos suggested adding an additional house (a bicameral legislature), elected by the lower house, consisting of the executive and some senators, and having special voting rights.

I disagree on a number of points. Firstly on the benefit of two houses to Liberty Alliance. In my opinion, an bicameral structure is useful to balance two competing demands for representation. For example, in Australia and the US, the lower house represents the people and each member must gain the support of roughly the same number of electors. The upper house, by comparison, represents the States, and each State is represented by the same number of Senators, regardless of population. In the UK, the competing demands for representation are historically the people (the Commons), and the supposedly more intelligent upper class 'rightful leaders' (the Lords). In Liberty Alliance we don't have that kind of distinction, so there are no competing demands for representation to balance. (Unless we want to recognise experience in playing NS, and give experienced players a privileged position - I do not want to do this, as this would be silly and would create two classes of nations. I would prefer all member nations to be equal.)

A bicameral structure can also be useful to keep a check on the government, as they usually do not have a majority in both houses, but they usually do in the lower house. In this situation, as the lower house is just a rubber stamp, the benefit of the upper house is that it can set up reviews, question the government's behaviour, etc. However, as I can't really imagine political parties developing in Liberty Alliance, it follows that no one will ever really have a majority in the lower house, and therefore this house can perform all review roles usually undertaken by the upper house on its own.

There are two arguments posted by Balthamos for a bicameral legislative structure. Firstly that this is a way of keeping the government accountable to the citizens/members of Liberty Alliance and secondly that this would make it eaiser to pass ministry specific legislation in a form required by the minister, by restricting the vote to the upper house.

On the first point, I argue that as per the model suggested in my last post, the Government will be responsible to the Legislative Assembly (and therefore all members of Liberty Alliance) so long as the Assembly can remove them. Requiring ministers to maintain the confidence of the Assembly means they can be questioned and removed at any time. This can be done without also placing them in a sperate house. This is technically the case in Australia (well actually, if the Govt. looses the confidence of the lower house, they must call an election, and the new members may choose to support the incumbent or the opposition, but as our Assembly consists of all members, just choosing a new government/minister is effectively the same thing).

On the second point, I argue that it would be undemocratic to allow some legislation to be passed by only a select group of members, without the chance of a vote in the House where all members can vote. This would allow some legislation to be passed solely by the cabinet and not by the members of Liberty Alliance, which in fact confuses the lines between the executive branch and the legislatice branch, going against the separation of powers which I agree we should maintain.

I would be happy to hear others views on this

The Judicial Branch
I like Balthamos's idea, but I think we should mandate that at least three Judges be appointed, so as to avoid corruption. If this convention agrees with me that the Founder should not be part of the executive, then I suggest they could be a permanent member (what better arbitrator of disputes in a region than the region's founder?) This is, of course, only of Balthamos wants to take up this role.

I also suggest that the Court should have the power to arbitrate all disputes between nations in the region, and disputes between the Government and nations (for eg if a nation breaks a law passed by the legislative branch.

Elections and the Bill of Rights
I will comment on these later... I have already written my essay for the night (sorry for the length guys...)


QS

This post has been edited by Quantumsoft on Dec 10 2005, 01:03 PM

Bill of Rights
I really like the Genoshan Bill of Rights posted by Balthamos. I have made some changes so it is more relevant to Liberty Alliance and to the wording. Below is the first draft of how I propose the bill of rights should appear in our constitution.

Members should pay particular attention to (proposed) Article 1, which gives nations a right of complete control over their own affairs. This is directly opposed to a Bill of Rights which mandates that member nations uphold certain rights within their own borders.

Are there any other rights which should be included? Does everyone agree that these rights should be protected? Does everyone agree with the wording I have suggested? (Wording is particularly important here as it is likely to be the most frequently referred to part of this constitution, especially by the Judiciary).

Elections
Balthamos suggested we hold elections every three months. I initially thought of this time frame too, but I think having elections that regularly would require a more active region. I can't imagine members of Liberty Alliance getting all that excited about, and participating in, elections all that often. (Look at how many members are active in the forums at the moment, despite repeated pleas from Balthamos and myself for nations to join.) I think we would have more of a chance of a successful and vibrant election if they were more of an event, not just a regular occurrence. I therefore suggest we find a time frame somewhere between every 6 to 12 months. Remember that whatever we decide, it is just a maximum (before Ministers have to face another election), as Ministers can be removed at any time by a vote in the Legislative Assembly (that is, if we agree on my model of responsible government or Balthamos's model of an executive Senate). Another question which should be addressed in relation to elections is if we should require a minimum percentage of members to vote for the result to be valid.

QS

My apologies for my absence from the forums, I too have many other duties in this game, and added stresses that come to this game especially in these times.

Due to the fact that it is almost 2am here, I am tired, and will probably not post a whole deal. If that is the case, I will post more later.

Firstly, I support the motion of a Bill of Rights. However, I am concerned with Article 3, regarding the Election of the Delegate. It is of my opinion that endo-whoring, the system that is advocated in this Bill, is not democratic. A full election for the position should happen, like the ministers.

3 months in my experiance is a good enough time for work to happen between elections. That is roughly 92 days, including election periods, to work for a mandate. I believe that 6-12 months of no elections is almost un-democratic, as it does not allow the citizens of our region the right to regularly declare their support or opposition to the current government. It is almost a oligarchic system with the allowance of an election once in a blue moon then, imo.

Frankly, current recruitment is not effective. As UN Delegate, I ask interested members to come together to form a Recruitment Council, to provide a strategy and report on the recruitment of new members to our region. If you all wish, I will post recruitment statements in Feeder off-site forums, where there is a possibility that they will actually be seen.

I too am curious on an explination for the "executive branch" that Founder Balthamos described. I will await his explination before I comment.

It is of my personal opinion that there should be only 1 house. I believe it undermines the democracy of our region to have true power rested in "Senators" and the Ministers. I've never been a fan of republicanism in real life, but thats another story. Democracy means "rule by the people". I feel that some of the systems talked about here do not provide that sense of democracy.

I am going to stop here, as I'm seriously losing it right now, lol. My apologies for leaving some comments unfinished, but you will just have to wait, now won't you .

Bill of Rights
In defence of article 3 of the bill of rights, the reason I advocated leaving the UN Delegate selection process up to Nation States is because the system used to elect a UN Delegate is defined by Nation States. We as a government have no control over it. We could hold elections to determine who those that vote want as UN Delegate, but this is no guarantee that this member will also receive the most number of endorsements.

Election Cycle
I agree that 6-12 months between elections is pushing it a bit, but I just don’t think elections every 3 months would work in Liberty Alliance. Given that this topic has now been open for a month and a half, and has attracted a grand total of 2 other members beside myself (one of which has now left the region), totalling 3 posts by members other than myself, I just can’t see any election campaign going anywhere. I can’t see members coming into the forums and having lively election debates so frequently, given that we can’t even attract much response for a once in a life time constitutional convention. I am prepared to admit that elections every 12 months is too infrequent, but I still support a 6 month election cycle. Remember though, whatever time frame we decide, citizens can declare their support or opposition for Ministers (or the entire government) at any time by moving a vote of no confidence in the Legislative Assembly. In other words, citizens can effectively call an election at any time they wish (assuming that members agree with the ‘responsible government’ model I proposed in my second post).

House Keeping
I am unsure if Drinnon will continue to post in this forum given that he has now left the region. However, as the arbitrator of this debate, I would like to extend to him an invitation to continue to make suggestions and comments on this topic as a (nonvoting) member.

QS

Sorry I've been inactive with the region and forums for quite some time, but (I don't know if my opinion counts because I'm not a UN nation!) I just wanted to say that I agree with Balthomas's Bill of rights and other parts of the constitution.

I think a timeframe of elections being 6-12 months is a good one, seeing as nations like mine are slightly inactive in our region. I'll try to be more active from now on, but no from other NS experiences before coming here that inactivity is a prominent and crippling disability to a region. So as long as nations know long in advance when the elections are taking place and for what the position is. But I also think 6-12 months is a rather long term in office, most world gov'ts have long terms. So in our region I think that term should do fine, at least for now.

Trying to be more active,

Finnish Pride

Finish Pride, as a member of this region your opinion counts in this debate just as much as every other nation's, regardless of your UN status. When you say

I assume you mean that you agree with my modified version of Balthamos's Bill of Rights, or do you mean that you like the original, in preference to my version?

As Drinnon is no longer a member of Liberty Alliance, it seems that we have no objection to a 6-12 month election cycle (this is not to say that we should completely dismiss his arguments). The only issue to be decided here, now, is where in the 6-12 month period we want elections. I propose every 6 months. Ideas? Arguments for longer?

I would also like to propose a basic structure for the constitution:

1. Liberty Alliance (preamble)
2. Bill of Rights
3. The Legislature
4. The Executive
4.1 Structure of the Executive (including elections/appointment)
4.2 Powers of the Executive
5. The Judiciary
6. Amending the Constitution

I invite all members to comment on this structure and also to contribute to or comment on how any part should operate.

QS

Perhaps it would be wise foryou to just write a constitution then we all vote on it?

I will do that, but I wanted to get people's input first. It would be silly to have a region wide vote without first seeing what people want. Besides, the chances of having the vote fail on one or two technical points (like how often to hold elections, or how we choose the UN Delegate and/or President) are too high. Look what happened in Australia in 1999, most people wanted a republic, but they didn't like one part of the model and the referendum failed. If this happened, we would have to hold another region wide vote, and given the current level of participation in this region, that could be difficult. This way, anyone that cares can work with me to find an appropriate model. So if anyone has an opinion on this issue, please express it here!

What I will do, is progressively post sections here for people to comment on before we vote (the Bill of Rights is already up).

QS

Quantumsoft, I did mean I liked your modified version. I think 6 months is the perfect time for positions, as leaders would get a pretty long term but no so long as to always be in power.