Several obstacles exist to such a resolution, but it is our belief that these obstacles are not insurmountable. Among them are the following:
- Resolutions must be non-discriminatory. This means that they cannot have a greater impact on the condemned than the World Assembly at large. As a matter of fact, we should expect that they will have a smaller effect on the condemned than on the membership as a whole, especially in so far as the latter can escape any effects by simply quitting the World Assembly (assuming that they were a member in the first place).
It is our belief that this problem can be overcome by focusing entirely on the impact that sanctions would have on the membership of the World Assembly and ignoring (both for game purposes and within the body of the resolution itself) any effect that such sanctions would have on the condemned.
As a secondary point, since the condemned isn’t going to suffer as a consequence of sanctions, we should make sure that the effects of imposing them are either positive for the membership or mild in impact – otherwise, sanctions will effectively be tantamount to “cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” - There is no category for sanctions per se. Consequently, we need to identify the single greatest effect that such sanctions would have and write the resolution to match the relevant category. Other effects can be included in the resolution, but these must be minimized in impact so that they do not lead to a legal challenge based on improper categorization.
- We must avoid metagaming issues. This will be tricky, because there will be some who argue that any sanctions proposal must raise metagaming issues; indeed, in a current II OOC debate thread, it’s effectively being argued that current WA resolutions recognizing the existence of international waters violate metagaming rules. We reject this notion, as it would imply that any resolution with international impact violates the rule against metagaming at the same exact moment as many nations argue that the World Assembly should only be passing resolutions that address international issues – a pair of positions which, if embraced simultaneously, would effectively eliminate our ability to do anything at all.