Official Summary of Proposed Constitutional Amendment
Pursuant to my Constitutional duties as Speaker of the Union, I have prepared the following impartial summary of the generally-finalized Proposed Amendment 6 to the Third Constitution. For full disclosure, I am the author of the Amendment and the following text is also in the Amendment itself. Please contact me with any questions or comments.
Section 1: Clause 1 is a typo correction for consistency with the section. The change in Clause 2 prohibits military conscription at any age (the previous version of the clause affected prohibited conscription only for those under 18). The change in Clause 3 strikes a clause that gave the "Right of inventors and authors to secure, for limited times, the exclusive right to their respective discoveries and writings, in accordance with national law"—Clause 3 repeals the conditional right to patent and copyright holding, and similar practices.
Section 2: The major change to this section is permitting members of SLU-allied military organizations (see Section 10) and members of SLU government operations to automatically receive World Assembly waivers. They are required to notify the Minister of Immigration when such military involvement ceases; the Minister of Immigration is required to document such waivers (as have been allowed by the Delegate) to the Speaker of the Union.
Section 3: This section's revisions allow for the re-attainment of Member State status once a state that has lost residency regains it (which is the generally accepted but un-codified interpretation of current law), and, allows Member States (aside from elected officials) to transfer Member State status to another nation upon informing the Minister of Immigration.
Section 4: This section clarifies that the required duration of Member State status to run for Chancellor, Speaker, and World Assembly Delegate is cumulative, and may be non-continuous—whether that time may be non-continuous is not addressed by current law.
Section 5: This section adds protected categories against whom discrimination may be considered hate speech—the list of such categories is now "sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, age, or ability".
Section 6: A sentence is added to the description of Resolutions of Parliament to explicitly allow Acts to require a higher passage threshold (2/3) or additional sponsors for relevant Resolutions, as some Acts currently do and as the Constitution does for certain types of Resolutions.
Section 7: This section revises forum ownership and responsibilities—instead of belonging to the Founder (which has not actually been the case for years), the forum will belong to the Speaker or to the trustee of the forum website (with the new forum, this will be North American Republics). It also requires the quarterly backup of the forum by the Speaker (feasible on the new forum); other obligations regarding the forum administrator account are simply continued to the new trustee. The Chancellor is permitted to serve as a backup trustee. The Section additionally provides that the previous forum should be made as accessible as possible.
Section 8: This section makes the voting portals the primary means of voting for bills and elections, while adding qualifications for feasibility to the secrecy of voting results and the ability of Member States to put their own legislation to vote.
Section 9: This revision prohibits states running in multiple concurrent elections.
Section 10: Aside from a typo correction, this section provides makes legal recruitment to military organizations with which the SLU has a treaty (a treaty with an encompassing interregional organization is also acceptable) and the Open Parliament has deemed the values of the organization to be in line with those of the SLU. Such actions might be dubious in current law.
Section 11: This Section finds that any treaties in effect as of the passage of the Third Constitution (the SLU's membership in the Arnhelm Declaration of Recruitment Standards and the long-outdated Merging of the UDLS into the SLU) were repealed by it because there is no provision for continuity of treaties. It explicitly clarifies that the SLU may re-admit itself to the Arnhelm Declaration.
