[2302.HQ] In re Emergency Citizenship Committee Appointments
Petition
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If the Council on Regional Security rescinds an emergency Prime Ministerial appointment to the Citizenship Committee pursuant to Citizenship Act. 1.(4), does the CRS’s decision apply retrospectively, such that legally it is as if the emergency Citizenship Committee member were never appointed, or does the CRS’s decision apply prospectively only, removing the emergency member from the Citizenship Committee as of the date of the CRS decision?
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If the CRS’s decision applies retrospectively, are all official actions taken by the emergency Citizenship Committee member while in office rendered null and void as of the date of the CRS decision to rescind their appointment?
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If so, do all citizens whose citizenship applications were approved as a result of the emergency Citizenship Committee member’s membership on the Committee automatically lose citizenship status?
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If so, does that invalidate the results of any election in which such citizens cast decisive votes?
Summary of the Ruling
It is the opinion of the Court that rescissions of emergency appointments to the Citizenship Committee are not retroactive nor do they void the validity of actions taken by said emergency member while they held office. This is supported by the fact that a detailed reading of Citizenship Act 1.4 shows rescissions need not be retroactive, and further by the interests of minimising the potential disruption that retroactive rescissions would cause to the orderly administration of the region.
Chief Justice Kringle delivered the ruling, signed also by Justice Pronoun.
The High Court has been asked to evaluate the nature and practical effect of the rescission of emergency appointments to the Citizenship Committee when enacted by the Council on Regional Security. This request, structured in the form of four distinct questions, seeks to determine whether rescissions are retroactive and, if so, what effects this may have over relevant government processes.
The Citizenship Act establishes that the Prime Minister “may appoint an emergency member to handle any urgent matters of the committee” (Citizenship Act 1.4) in cases where no other member is available; it similarly establishes that the Council on Regional Security may “on security grounds only, rescind the Prime Minister’s appointment” (Citizenship Act 1.4) but it does not offer further guidance on the effect of such a rescission.
Petitioner has argued that rescissions are retroactive, making the point that “when a legal order is rescinded, it is rendered void ab initio” (Welly, 2023) and further noting that the Citizenship Act makes separate use of the terms ‘rescind’ and ‘remove’ when referring to the ouster of members of the Citizenship Committee, suggesting that the effects of both actions must therefore be different.
The Court acknowledges these arguments but differs in a number of ways.
While the Citizenship Act (hereafter the ‘Act’) does make separate use of the terms ‘rescind’ and ‘remove’, the fact is that the Act also makes use of the term ‘rescind’ twice within the same section. Section 1.4 uses the term ‘rescind’ to refer to ousters by both the Council on Regional Security and the Prime Minister:
The emergency member’s tenure will last until the Prime Minister rescinds the appointment (…). (Citizenship Act 1.4)
The argument could be made that both cases of rescission should be seen as retroactive, but the Court would differ for two reasons.
First, the latter provision says that “the emergency member’s tenure will last until the Prime Minister rescinds the appointment” (Citizenship Act 1.4), suggesting that their tenure lasts for a definite period of time that is then interrupted by the Prime Minister’s intervention. If this applies then what follows is that either rescissions are not retroactive or the term ‘rescind’ has two different meanings, the latter being an outcome that the Court finds to result in absurdity.
Second, there was extremely limited debate on the choice of terms for what would become Section 1.4, which lends credence to the proposition that the term ‘rescind’ may have been used as a stylistic choice rather than a true and meaningful one. A cursory review of the relevant history shows that Prime Minister Roavin proposed Section 1.4 as an executive order and presented it already fully drafted (Roavin, 2018) to the Cabinet, where there was no meaningful debate by the ministers of the time; the situation was similar in the Assembly, where there was no discussion on the mechanisms for the ouster of an emergency member.
These reasons could be seen as insufficient on their own, but together they begin to form a narrative. In addition to the above two, the Court notes that reading rescissions as being retroactive would make governance more disruptive and unpredictable, seeing how citizens could be removed without warning or fault of their own, and along with them the validity their votes in both the Assembly and regional elections could potentially be called into question. It is the Court’s view that, when faced with such a decision, it is best to err on the side of guaranteeing the rights of citizens and the orderly and predictable administration of regional governance.
In view of the above, the Court rules that rescissions of emergency appointments to the Citizenship Committee are not retroactive nor do they void the validity of actions taken by said emergency member while they held office, and therefore all further questions to this case are rendered moot.
Footnotes and References
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Citizenship Act; Article 1, Section 4 (2023). The MATT-DUCK Law Archive.
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Welly (2023). Brief amicus curiae from 04 November 2023. Retrieved from In re Emergency Citizenship Committee Appointments - #7 by Welly.
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Roavin (2018). Executive Order: LegComm. Retrieved from Executive Order: LegComm
Submission: 04 Oct 2023 | Determination: 18 Oct 2023 | Ruling: 01 Jan 2024