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Glossary
45 terms that appear in the Constitution, in public debate or in the news, explained without legal training.
Property and the economy
- Commons
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Things held by everyone and by nobody in particular: land, water, the air, the grid, the spectrum, published knowledge. They cannot be sold, mortgaged or given away, and are used under revocable grants.
- Cooperative
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An enterprise run by the people who work in it. Everyone who works there is a member after at most six months, each member has one vote, and the officers are elected and can be removed at any time.
- Provision
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What you receive as of right, with no purchase involved. Essential provision is food, water, sanitation, housing, energy, healthcare, medicines, education, care, clothing, transport and access to communication. It depends on nothing you do.
- Knowledge commons
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Scientific knowledge, software, technical designs, seed varieties, pharmaceutical formulations and cultural works made with public resources, open to every person on equal terms. Patents and other exclusive rights over the use of knowledge are prohibited inside the Republic. Attribution and the moral rights of an author survive.
- Personal property
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Your dwelling, your household and family goods, your tools of craft, the products of your own labour, and residual units inside their period of validity. It is guaranteed, it is unseizable so far as a life of dignity requires, and it passes on death. The one thing it can never become is a means of employing another person.
- Workplace statement
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What the assembly of an enterprise publishes at the start of a planning period: the materials, energy, labour, equipment and knowledge it needs, the quantities and qualities it can produce, its ecological account, and the improvements it proposes. Overstating need or understating capacity is an offence under organic law.
- Fair allocation
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The regime that governs a queue when a catalogue falls short of the need registered against it: published criteria, decisions taken by identified persons, and a prohibition on scoring, ranking or profiling anyone in the process.
Ecology and limits
- Ecological flow
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The amount of water that has to stay in a river for the river to remain a river. It is fixed for every watercourse and cannot be reduced by any plan.
- Rebound effect
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What happens when a saving gets spent on using more, so that efficiency produces no reduction. Article 22(3) closes it by law: gains go to sufficiency, restoration, durability and shorter hours, and never to expansion.
- Tailings
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The waste rock and fine sludge left after ore has been milled. The tailings above Ferrista are an entry on the register of contaminated sites, which must be inventoried, published and remediated on a binding timetable.
- Throughput
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The physical flow of stuff through an economy: energy and materials in, waste and emissions out. It is what the Republic caps. Output and quality of life may rise inside a constant flow.
- Regenerative capacity
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The rate at which the biosphere replaces what is taken from it. Maintaining it conditions the validity of all economic planning, so a ceiling may be raised only on published evidence that the higher figure stays inside documented capacity, with a concurring opinion from the designated scientific institutions.
- Ecological emergency
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A declaration made by the Ecological Budget Authority, lapsing unless the Assembly confirms it. It runs on a separate track from a state of emergency under Title X, and a state of emergency may in no case suspend or override a measure taken under it.
Government and participation
- Incompatibility
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Two offices you may not hold at the same time. A seat in the Assembly cannot be combined with judicial office, an oversight office, a planning delegation, command in the forces or the management of an enterprise.
- Mandate
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Two different things in one word. For a member of the Assembly it means the authority of the office, exercised on their own judgement. For a delegate to a council it means binding instructions from the body that sent them, who can recall them at any time.
- Quorum
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The minimum number who must be present for a sitting to be valid. Half the members of the Assembly. It is not the same as a turnout threshold, and the two were regularly confused under the old text.
- Recall
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Removing an elected member before their term ends. Five per cent of a district's residents open a petition, the district votes, and no reason need be given.
- Sortition
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Filling a post by drawing lots from a defined pool, in place of election or appointment. Used here for constitutional justices, the Judicial Council, the oversight offices and restorative panels. There is a fuller article on it.
- Turnout threshold
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A rule voiding an election or referendum if too few people vote. It rewards organised abstention, because staying home counts as a no. One voided the election of 10 June 2025 and left the Republic without a parliament for fourteen weeks. It is now prohibited.
- Open list
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A ballot on which the voter chooses a list and may also express preference among its candidates, the preferences expressed overriding any order the list itself fixed. Seats are apportioned nationally by odd divisors, with no legal threshold, and then assigned to the district lists that polled strongest.
- Coordinating Bureau
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The chairs of the eight executive committees, presided over by the Presiding Officer of the Assembly. It settles conflicts of competence, prepares acts needing several committees, and represents the Executive Council before the chamber. It gives an instruction to a committee in no case, which is what keeps it from being a cabinet.
- Deliberative body drawn by lot
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Residents drawn by lot and composed to reflect the population, convened to hear evidence from differing views and to report with the dissents of its members. It holds no power of decision. The organ that convened it answers in writing, publicly and article by article within ninety days.
Law, courts and procedure
- Cassation
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Reviewing a judgment for errors of law, leaving the facts as the court below found them. It is the National Court's function, and it exists to keep the law the same in every part of the territory.
- Derogation
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Temporarily suspending a right during a declared emergency. Tightly limited, and some rights can never be suspended at all: freedom from torture, the ban on forced labour, essential provision, equality.
- Eternity clause
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A provision that cannot be amended by anyone, on the reasoning that a power created by a constitution cannot be used to destroy it. Eleven things sit behind one here.
- Justiciable
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Something a court can actually decide. Many constitutions promise housing and healthcare in terms no judge will touch. The minimum core here is justiciable on day one; the level above it is judged for reasonableness.
- Militant democracy
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A democracy that defends itself against movements seeking to abolish it. The danger is that the power gets used on the opposition, which is what happened in September 2024. Only a court may do it now, only on proof of acts, and no administrative body may classify anyone by ideology.
- Preliminary reference
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When an ordinary judge cannot decide a case without settling a constitutional question, they stop and ask the Constitutional Chamber. The answer binds that case and every similar case afterwards.
- Promulgation
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Publishing a law so that it takes effect. Done by the Presiding Officer within fifteen days, who has no power to refuse; if they fail to act the text takes effect anyway.
- Proportionality
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The test a court applies to any restriction of a right: is it suitable to its purpose, necessary because nothing milder would do, and not excessive in its effect. If it fails any limb it fails.
- Standing
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Whether you are allowed to bring a case at all. In most countries you must show the matter affects you personally. Here anyone may sue on behalf of a river or a forest, with no fee and no personal interest required.
Rights and their enforcement
- Horizontal effect
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When rights bind the state and equally employers, landlords, cooperatives and service providers in their dealings with people. Article 39(2) makes that explicit here.
- Non-retrogression
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The rule that what has been achieved cannot be taken back. A measure reducing an attained level of provision is presumed unconstitutional and the authority must prove it had no alternative.
- Reasonableness review
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The standard applied above the minimum core. A person may require that the measures of the planning bodies, the committees, the communes and the regions be coherent, adequately resourced, capable of progression within a stated time, attentive to those in greatest need, and open to review.
- Interim protection
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Provisional relief ordered by a court before the merits are decided, granted wherever a credible risk of irreparable harm is shown. It is what makes a remedy useful against something already under way.
- Personal liability
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The persons who decided upon or executed a violation answer for it themselves, and the liability of the organisation extinguishes none of it. The same rule attaches to anyone who ordered or executed a measure exceeding the emergency powers.
- Conscientious objection
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The guaranteed refusal to bear arms, answered by an alternative service of equal duration in care, restoration or civil protection. Compulsion to declare a belief, an opinion or an affiliation is prohibited separately.
The world outside
- Arbitration, investor-state
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A private tribunal, sitting outside a country's own courts, that decides disputes between a state and a foreign company. Many trade agreements require it. The Republic will not sign one that does: disputes with a company licensed here are heard by the courts here.
- Basing
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Letting a foreign state keep troops, aircraft, ships or listening posts on your territory. It is the usual price of a military alliance. The Republic prohibits it outright, which is one of two reasons it cannot join one.
- Blockade
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Cutting a place off from its supplies, usually by sea. The Republic has been on the receiving end twice, in both world wars, and may not take part in one that deprives people of food, water, medicine or energy.
- Conditionality
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Attaching policy demands to a loan: cut this, privatise that, and the money continues. The Republic removed the mechanism altogether, by prohibiting external borrowing altogether.
- Direct effect
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When a rule made outside a country becomes law inside it without the parliament enacting anything. It is how the European Union works. The Republic refuses it for every union alike: a common standard reaches nobody here until the Assembly passes it.
- Embargo
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A ban on trading with a state. Western governments imposed one on the Republic in 1949; Iosmein declined to enforce it. The Republic distinguishes measures aimed at a government from measures that land on a population, and refuses the second kind.
- Safeguards
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Inspection and accounting arrangements that show nuclear material has not been diverted to weapons. Every export licence the Republic has ever issued has had them, and nuclear weapons are prohibited.
- Sanctions
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Measures short of war meant to press a government into changing course: asset freezes, travel bans, trade restrictions. The Republic applies none that reach a population, and exports no weapon or surveillance technique to anybody, so it has little need of them.
Explanatory guidance, not law. Where it differs from the text, the text governs.