Celestiam: In Favor of GAR21

Honourable Friends and Colleagues of this Assembly,

The amendment laid before us today is probably one of the most discussed, most exciting, and most exceptional amendments to have made it to the floor. Never has an amendment taken so long to write and review. Never has a bill been so finely analysed and taken apart. Never has a set of clauses ever been so questioned. The amount of people, questions, suggestions, and work around this amendment is simply unprecedented. The GA President has awarded 7 days, the legal maximum, to review this bill in Debate. I would like the Assembly to appreciate that, before these 7 days, two months and a half’s work stand.

But if the debating, questioning, rewriting, rewording, challenging, predicting, arguing, speculating, and dreaming has taken so long, it is because the effects of this amendment will be of immense proportion. This may have taken 3 months to write, but this region will be looking back at this moment in many months and years. Not because I have the pretention to think this amendment will last for years, but because this amendment will set permanent foundations for a branch of government and aspect of the New West Indies that will shine through this region, and the multiverse.

My Honourable colleagues, we all stand proudly for democracy. We do not always agree, and that is in the name of democracy. Elections can get ugly, words can be posted that we regret posting, and disagreements can turn sour. But this is all in the name of democracy, and of making our region as great as possible. Yet we are a flawed democracy.

The Secretariat, and these days increasingly the Secretary General has been wielding otherworldly powers, powers that do not belong to the Secretariat, or to the GA. We elect our Secretariat to lead this Republic’s executive policy, yet very often our Secretary General has been tasked with adjudicating conflicts and punishing wrongdoers. New Stettin and the Greater Iran on Discord, Farechia and Electorate gameside, are all examples of cases where the Secretary General has had to act for the safety of our region and its values. If you think in the short term, this is okay. The SecGen has handled the cases, the threat is gone, and we can become complacent again. My honourable colleagues, this thinking is dangerous, and would preface our commonwealth’s demise.

In all these cases, we can only be thankful to luck. We are lucky that Karteria happens to be competent in adjudicating, is knowledgeable in our laws, and the cases are not too complex. But this is the product of coincidence. There is no requirement that the Secretary General have any talent in legal interpretation, §1 of the Constitution, or any understanding of the weight of punishments that they can dish out via ED’s and declarations. And why not? Our Secretaries are policy makers and department leaders: expecting them to be jurists is a misplaced expectation.

And even then, the unilateral nature of ED’s and declaration is dangerous. For every unilateral ban Karteria has pronounced, a little bit of the blind trust we place in officers we elect is threatened. Doubt arises: was the ban justified? Were they really guilty? Has the SecGen made the right choice? Doubts that no Secretary General, even one as competent or knowledgeable as Karteria, can fight. The trust in our institutions is eroded every time one of those emergency executive orders that sentence individuals to ban periods is signed, without the defendant or the region getting to defend themselves, raise questions, or analyse the facts. On the converse, we run the risk of having a Secretary General need to think of their image, of what the region will think, of whether their leniency or harshness will be questioned and unjustly linked to partisan or affective relations, perverting even the best Secretary-Generals’ judgement capacities! And who is to blame them?

This is only for criminal cases, arguably the easiest cases of all. How can we then expect Secretary-Generals to adjudicate on state cases about the rights and obligations of institutions, how they interact between themselves and citizens, whether due process was respected, elections were legal, and their results reliable? Often those cases involve the Secretary General due to the very potent nature of this position, creating unacceptable conflicts of interests. The Best SG’s will be forced to exercise mental gymnastics and be mindful of their biases, making their job way harder. The Worst SG’s won’t even realise it and pronounce biased decisions. If the power to exercise the rules and the power to judge how the rules are exercised falls to the same office, we do not have a democracy.

We do not have a democracy. With separation of powers being blurry around the highest office in the land, checks and balances not being equal, and the recourses of each institution against another’s wrongdoings so limited, the only thing that has kept our democracy running is the good faith and competence of those holding office. Allow me to repeat with emphasis: **Our democracy is secured by nothing other than luck and the goodwill of those currently in power**. It is a very precarious situation for our region to be in.

This amendment is the key. It is the solution to a problem that we will hopefully never have to run into. It allows our values, our republic, and the rule of law to stand firm. It dissociates the quality of the judgements we get from the quality of those officers we elect in executive positions. The amendment creates an impartial and knowledgeable Court, with provisions for conflicts of interest. This means the citizens of this region will never have to fear a capricious, misinformed, or biased Secretary General. This means defendants will get a chance to defend themselves, and obtain sentencing independent of what one random person elected for a completely different tasks thinks. This means the region will be allowed to see how justice is delivered, and understand what actions lead to what consequences. My honourable colleagues, this amendment is what will allow us to be permanently cured from the risk of falling into the state of nature, and make us a civilised region with values firmly anchored by the rule of law.

Maybe this amendment is not perfect, or not exactly how you wanted it. It doesn’t matter! This amendment can be changed in the future, and the structure of our Courts and Judicial system will not be permanently engraved in stone. What will become permanently engraved in stone is impartiality, fairness, and Justice. This amendment is an integral part of the guarantee that you, one day, will be able to challenge it, and any other aspect of our region. This amendment will create a Court that will elevate us at a level of competency matching that of the greatest regions in the game. The competence and skill of our judicial system and the stability of our government will be comparable to that of those regions with hundreds and thousands of nations. This amendment will enter us as one of the elite regions of the multiverse.

If you believe the time to put an end to a bill of attainder system that belongs only to absolute monarchies and small regions is over, if you believe the time to show how powerful we can be has come, if you believe the time for intelligent, rational, and fair juridical debate is now well overdue, you, like me, will vote **FOR** this amendment.

October 31st, 2019

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