Liagolas wrote:OOC:
A justification within the game to tell people "Your roleplay is wrong, you can't be non-compliant" which hardly seems like it would end well.
OOC: this is the goal. Non-compliant roleplay is used almost exclusively in a way to denigrate the work of authors. "Your resolution is terrible, so we're not gonna listen." The OOC motivation here is to make such arguments ICly impossible and provide OOC justification to ignore it.
It is true that there is roleplay of noncompliance which does not deliberately denigrate authors or participants in the shared illusion of the game. I use a little bit of it (arguing a prolonged series of legal disputes), and players like Auralia often manage to roleplay noncompliance without harming the group experience. I don't see this as incompatible with the presumptive competence of WA committees.
There are many actions taken by competent experts and organizations that are intended to bring about a behavior that nonetheless fail. As Captain Picard once said, it is possible to make no mistakes and still fail. Assuming this passes, a player could theoretically roleplay a nation who remains non-compliant at the cost of the serious penalties imposed. After all, there are ways to evade sanctions, and WA members are the minority in the world. To be realistic, however, I suspect such nations would have to roleplay the serious impacts of those sanctions.
So, tl;dr, I don't think that the possibility of the committee failing to accomplish a specific goal upset the presumption of effectiveness and competency. I do think it seriously affects non-compliant roleply, and that is the goal.
The proposal both acknowledges and thus to some degree legitimizes deliberate non-compliance while simultaneously trying to make it so that you can say no, you can't not comply, and by so doing it inadvertently makes this bizarre tension between assumptions about committees in legislation and the way in which some persons play the game. This feels... weird.
There is a legal defense to criminal (and certain civil) charges of necessity. Noncompliance from a situation where it simply isn't possible to comply is not a new concept, and since the committee is specifically directed to consider it, is reasonably applicable.
A good example comes from the law of not passing the double yellow line on a road. If you are driving at night in a storm and have suddenly swerve around a disabled vehicle in the road, and you are for some reason charged, you can argue that it was impossible for you to not cross the line, as you had insufficient room to stop, despite driving appropriately in the conditions, and not hit the disabled vehicle.
So, too, could nations defend. A nation that fails to offer adequate sanitation under GAR#288 because they were the subject of an aggressive military invasion, catastrophic earthquake, or economic emergency argue that it was literally impossible to comply, or was so impractical as to be impossible. The committee is authorized to consider a variety of factors, such as intent and ability to comply. Since the law is designed to operate in the real world and not the kind of theoretical plane where engineering exercises exist, I don't see a conflict.