There's been a lot of disussion about the judiciary lately.
One of the controversial questions has been the prerogative of the judiciary to perform the judicial footwork to translate the inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) into a collection of legally protected rights balanced off against each other and other concerns in various circumstances.
Similarly, in view of this potentially broad remit of the judiciary there has been or at least in my view there should be concern over it being the prerogative of the judiciary to determine what constitutes a criminal offense in our community.
If we are ever to give our judiciary broad remit to arbitrate disputes and meter out sentences for alleged offenses I think it would be desirable in advance to have done some footwork to inform or frame the decisions of the judiciary.
With regard to the UDHR I agree with those who have said that the phrasing of the declaration is so broad that its articles can easily be interpreted both ways depending on the particular circumstances of a case that may have enjoyed the better illumination.
Similarly, a large number of the rights in the UDHR are simply not relevant to the virtual life of a CDS citizen.
What I am thinking of specifically is to initiate some sort of process that would potentially lead to a comprehensive catalogue of the legal rights enjoyed by citizens of the CDS. This catalogue should build on the subset of rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that are deemed to be relevant here (hopefully as many as possible) but describe the circumstances under which disputes over these rights might arise at a higher level of detail and contain guidance as to how to resolve and balance the rights against each other in such cases.
Similarly, a process could be initiated to conceive of, enumerate, specify and determine maximum sentencing for a catalogue of criminal offenses in the CDS that could be sanctioned by our courts.
The intention with such efforts would of course be to put a restraining influence on the free exercise by the courts of their mandate to develop case law under a common law system as a supplement to the system of checks and balances and cautious unfolding that we can expect also to be implemented in the new judiciary.
I would like to solicit your comments, opinions, ideas and points of view on this idea so as to better know how the Simplicity Party might proceed on this issue.