Your Honour and may it please the Court,
I will argue in this brief that the Court should sustain the rejection of Siberian Districts’ citizenship application. To this effect I will explain why I believe the Court should adopt a rational basis standard when reviewing challenges to decisions on citizenship applications, and I will then explain why, under any standard of review, the rejection was a lawful and proper exercise of the Citizenship Committee and the Council on Regional Security’s discretionary powers.
I. The Court should adopt a rational basis standard
Charter VII.4 grants the Court the power to “declare any (…) official act of government (…) void upon a determination that it violates the terms of [the Charter]” (Charter VII.4). Insofar as the Charter does say the former, I will be the first to concede that the Court has full authority to consider challenges to the rejection of a citizenship application. I do contest, however, that the Court should give broad deference to the discretion of the Citizenship Committee and the Council on Regional Security, and limit its review to whether the rejection was a rational exercise of government power that did not inherently violate any rights or constitutional laws.
Citizenship Act 1.1 says that the Citizenship Committee “is responsible for granting and revoking the citizenship of members” (Citizenship Act 1.1), establishing it as the primary institution involved in the citizenship process. Citizenship Act 2.1 regulates the requirements to obtain citizenship and complements 1.1 by providing a more comprehensive listing of the primary institutions tasked with participating in the applications process.
- the Citizenship Committee does not opine that they are seeking citizenship in bad faith;
- they are not attempting to join with multiple nations or identities; and
- they are not considered by the Council on Regional Security to be a significant risk to regional security.
Citizenship Act 2.1a grants to the Citizenship Committee the power to determine whether an applicant is seeking citizenship in “bad faith”, while Citizenship Act 2.1c grants to the Council on Regional Security the power to determine whether an applicant presents a “significant risk to regional security”. There are no qualifications or guidance within the Citizenship Act on what constitutes bad faith or being a significant risk to regional security, leaving it to each of the aforementioned institutions to make that determination based on their best use of their knowledge and experience. It would be reasonable to read the Citizenship Act as expecting both institutions to act not merely as ministerial entities but rather as specialist entities who must exercise discretion, based on their knowledge and experience, to decide whether an applicant may, if granted citizenship, damage the region in any way.
If the Citizenship Committee and the Council on Regional Security have broad discretion to assess the suitability of citizen applicants on account of the specialist knowledge that they bring to the application process then the role of the Court cannot be seen as one of substantive review, but rather as that of a guarantor of rights. There is no doubt that the Court can and should consider whether any rights were violated, and certainly whether the application was rejected despite a lack of evidence, but anything beyond that, such as evaluating the sufficiency of the evidence considered by these primary institutions, would place the Court in a role that the Citizenship Act reserved for other entities.
The Court, knowledgeable and fair though it may be, does not have the specialist knowledge and experience to adequately consider whether the evidence shows that an applicant comes in bad faith or presents a significant risk to regional security. To the extent that the region does have institutions with such expertise, the Court ought to circumscribe its review to whether the Committee and Council acted rationally -that is, whether they considered evidence and followed a reasonable process according to law- and allow the primary institutions, as designated in the Citizenship Act, to exercise their discretion as provided in regional law.
II. The Court should sustain the application’s rejection
While the Court should, as argued above, adopt a rational basis standard, one is not necessary for it to decide that the application was lawfully rejected. Indeed, the Council on Regional Security acted within its discretionary authority in deciding that Siberian Districts presents a significant risk to regional security.
Siberian Districts is a member of the Brotherhood of Malice (BoM), as disclosed in their application (Siberian Districts, 2024), and while petitioner argues that BoM is not a proscribed region this is not relevant to the case. There is no provision in the Citizenship Act that limits the status of “significant risk to regional security” to members of proscribed regions, or indeed even mentions proscribed regions. It follows that an applicant can be a significant risk to regional security without being in a proscribed region, or due to actions or motives unconnected to a proscribed region.
There is however a more significant reason why Siberian Districts is a significant risk to regional security, which is the fact that they were the Minister of the Army during the 2016 attempted coup d’ètat, and therefore a senior figure in the so-called Transitional Government of the South Pacific. Siberian Districts was elected to lead the regional military but instead stood by a concerted attempt at the highest echelons of power to expel political opponents from the region and unlawfully dissolve the Coalition. In other words, Siberian Districts participated in the ultimate act of betrayal against the region.
The argument will be made that the Assembly granted amnesty to all involved in the 2016 attempted coup d’ètat, and while may have been true at one point it beyond certainty no longer the case.
Siberian Districts was granted amnesty by Assembly Resolution to Restore the Coalition of the South Pacific B2 via the following provision:
This amnesty was granted with two conditions: that the beneficiary behave well and acknowledge their culpability, and that the Assembly could revoke the amnesty at any time within the following six months (Assembly Resolution, 2016). I would contest that a cursory review of forum posts showed no clear acknowledgement of culpability but I will grant that said acknowledgement could have been made elsewhere.
Even if Siberian Districts met the first condition, the Assembly, constituted at the time as the 2016 Great Council, did revoke the amnesty less than five months later via its passage of the 2016 Great Council Continuing Resolution, whose very first article says that “all previous laws of the Coalition will no longer have any legal force” (Assembly Resolution, 2016). If any argument is made that the Assembly Resolution to Restore the Coalition of the South Pacific is a resolution, not a law, it should be noted that the resolution refers to itself as a law in its section C2, which says that “this law shall be held to the same standards of voting and passage as an amendment to the Charter” (Continuing Resolution, 2016).
To the extent that Siberian Districts’ amnesty was revoked and no longer has any legal force, the Council on Regional Security is fully within its rights under Citizenship Act 2.1c to consider their participation as a senior figure in the 2016 attempted coup d’ètat as cause for them to present a “significant risk to regional security”.
For the foregoing reasons, the Court should sustain the rejection.
Footnotes and References
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Charter of the South Pacific (2024). The MATT-DUCK Law Archive.
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Citizenship Act (2023). The MATT-DUCK Law Archive.
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Siberian Districts (2024). Siberian (Siberian Districts). Retrieved from Siberian (Siberian Districts).
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Assembly of the South Pacific (2016). Assembly Resolution to Restore the Coalition of the South Pacific. Retrieved from Assembly Resolution on the Restoration of the Coalition of the South Pacific.
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2016 Great Council (2016). 2016 Great Council Continuing Resolution. Retrieved from https://tspforums.xyz/thread-4119.html.