Proposal Thread: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=482334
Link to Queued Proposal: https://www.nationstates.net/page=UN_vi ... 1588715153
Rule(s) broken: Contradiction (GAR2), Game Mechanics
Clause(s) in question:
§ 3. All legislation following on its promulgation has to undergo vacatio legis, during which it is not in force. Legislation may come to force without vacatio legis if it is passed in a national emergency. This section does not apply to legislation that came into force prior to this resolution being passed by the World Assembly.
Reasoning:
GAR #2: Rights And Duties Of WA States explicitly states in Section III, Article 9 that:
Every WA Member State has the duty to carry out in good faith its obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law, including this World Assembly, and it may not invoke provisions in its constitution or its laws as an excuse for failure to perform this duty.
The clause in question from RPoN mandates that all member nations must not comply with passed WA legislation due to its requirement for "vacatio legis". This directly contradicts the requirement laid out in GAR 2 that nations must carry out obligations arising from international law, in this case being passed WA legislation. GAR 2 Section III, Article 9 explicitly prevents the creation of any law within a member nation to not perform the required duties spelled out in passed WA resolutions (amoung other items). This proposal attempts to create such a law to force member nations to not comply.
While one might notice that plenty of resolutions currently possess "phase in" periods that allow member nations time before the passed legislation takes affect, this is fundamentally different. Those resolutions that possess "phase in" periods do so by themselves and for themselves, and because those "phase in" periods exist within the text and are explicitly created for that resoltion, non-compliance does not occur. In this case regarding RPoN, it is forcing all member nations to undergo "vacatio legis", during which the passed WA Resolution "is not in force". This is inducing illegal non-compliance because it is attempting to apply a "phase in" period to a resolution that did not internally allow one. In doing so, this proposal contradicts GAR #2's requirement as shown above.
Game Mechanics Rule (viewtopic.php?f=9&t=159348):
Game Mechanics: Proposals can not affect any aspect of how the game works. This includes and is not limited to mandating ejection of member nations for non-compliance. Suggestions for improving or modifying gameplay can be posted in the Technical forum.
Furthermore, I would assert that it is a Game Mechanics violation for a proposal to attempt to force all other passed WA legislation to under-go a period of time before it is applied to member nations. Following similar reasoning above, this proposal would require passed WA legislation to act in a way that that it did not specify in its own text. This proposal forces WA legislation to not take effect upon passage when such passed legislation takes effect immediately in the current state of the game unless otherwise stated within any individual resolution.
Allowing a resolution the power to arbitrarily prevent the application of all passed WA legislation for an unspecific amount of time appears to be in no way compatible with the current GA rule-set as shown above.
Edit: In addressing the argument of "the proposal only addresses domestic laws, not international ones such at the WA". The proposal explicitly states how it applies to all laws (later refered to as 'legislation' in the text) which reasonably includes WA legislation in this context. So I do not see any reasonable way that one could argue this. But if they did.... This does not matter because the WA acts through domestic laws being passed in each member nation in order to become compliant and because of this, those specific laws are under the same protections inherently given to WA legislation. Impacting those domestic laws that are a direct result of passed WA legislation would create a significant amount of noncompliance no matter the interpretation, therefore still contradicting GAR #2.