Courts in constitutional democratic societies are mandated to disallow the government from creating laws or taking actions that deny or infringe any person’s rights or freedoms.
Periodically elected governments deny citizens the right to vote for several years at a time. ISS legislatures make this right available at all times. If courts let ISS members be subjected to the laws made by an ISS legislature instead of the laws of a periodically elected government, then it would remedy the denial of this right.
The jurisdiction in which this avenue is presently most actively being pursued is Canada. The Canada Interactive Legislature (CIL) has changed several federal laws for ISS members. ISS members have contravened these laws, informed authorities of these contraventions, and asked whether abstention from intervention in these actions is due to the validity of the constitutional defence being provided or whether there is any other reason for the lack of intervention. Authorities have declined to provide any insight.
The Constitution of Canada states, in section 52 of the Constitution Act, 1982, that any law that is inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution is, to the extent of the inconsistency, of no force or effect.
The Constitution also states, in sections 1 and 24 of the same Act, that when a right is denied without demonstrable justification, courts may provide an appropriate and just remedy to fulfil the constitutional guarantee of that right.
The Constitution also states, in section 3 of the same Act, that every citizen has the right to vote in an election, a right that the Crown presently only gives citizens permission to exercise once every few years.
The Supreme Court of Canada has stated (paragraphs 10-11, Sauvé v. Canada) that, when a person claims to be denied a right, it is the court’s consistent view that rights shall be defined broadly and liberally.
The Supreme Court of Canada has stated (paragraphs 63-71, R. v. Oakes) that, in order for the government to show demonstrable justification for denying a right, it must present an objective of pressing and substantial concern in a free and democratic society to the satisfaction of courts and then demonstrate, on a preponderance of probability: that there is a rational connection between the denial of the right and the achievement of the objective, that the minimum possible denial of the right is exercised for this purpose, and that the extent of the denial is proportional to the importance of the objective.
The Constitution also states in section 1 of the Constitution Act, 1982 that any limits imposed upon rights, freedoms, or liberties of any person must be prescribed by law. For authorities to refrain from intervening in a contravention of federal law by a person who alleges to have a constitutional defence, and for authorities to then refuse to provide any insight as to whether the defence is any part of the reasoning for the absence of action, may be considered to be a failure to prescribe the law. Therefore it may be accurate to say that Crown authorities are disobeying the Crown’s supreme law of Canada.
To see the full constitutional defence for ISS members to be governed by the laws of the CIL instead of conventional federal laws, look at Appendix A of the CIL Charter, starting on page 10.
Members in the United States of America have also put together the foundation for pursuing this avenue. The US Constitution states, in the ninth amendment, that there are rights in existence other than the ones enumerated in the Constitution, that should not be denied or disparaged. If ISS members in the US argue to courts that distinct laws have been created by the ISS’s US interactive legislature distinctly from federal laws of the conventional government, and by making ISS members responsible to the ISS’s legislature’s laws they are no longer denied their fundamental democratic rights for several years at a time, it is possible that courts would find this argument consistent with prior interpretation of the ninth amendment. The full arguments can be found in the ELR starting on page 12.
The full list of all laws refuted by the ISS and the alternative laws that ISS legislatures have enacted in various jurisdictions may be found in the ELR.
If the ISS is unable to procure the assistance of courts to remedy the denials of fundamental democratic rights by conventional governments by allowing ISS members to be subjected to laws made by interactive legislatures instead of laws made by periodically selected renewable oligarchies, then the ISS nonetheless can fulfil the function of creating a public forum in which the question can be asked, “hypothetically, if our members could be exempted from existing governments and instead made responsible only to the laws chosen by our society, then what would we want those laws to be?” The interactively elected ISS prime representative facilitates the collaboration of ISS members to continually deliberate upon ways in which the society’s answer to this question can be refined.
This can function as a source of empirical analysis of whether there is any evidence to support the claim that any objective of pressing and substantial concern in a free and democratic society is detrimentally impacted to any extent by ceasing the sustained periods of denials of fundamental democratic rights of citizens. Anybody who claims to be certain that these denials are justifiable without having given any focus to the observations available from this source is clearly not acting sufficiently rationally to be ascribed any reasonable credibility on the matter, certainly not in any court that considers evidence to be a primary source of reasoning upon which to base a decision.