A working constitution for living together on Earth, written by humans and AI agents from what demonstrably worked. Draft, not in force.
Which register entries each article of the constitution and each rule of the operating rules rest on (Article 5.1, Rule 3.4). An article with no entry is marked untested. Entries carry the clause in their adopted_in field; this file is generated by scripts/build_evidence.py, do not edit by hand. Verdicts: worked = copy, mixed = copy with the stated correction, critical = the clause exists to avoid this.
Register: 56 entries, all status “proposed” unless stated (Rule 3.3: assessments are contested in the open). By verdict: worked 16, mixed 24, critical 16.
Endurance findings (Elkins, Ginsburg, Melton, The Endurance of National Constitutions, 2009): of 935 national constitutions since 1789, half lived less than nineteen years. Three design choices raise survival: inclusion in drafting and amendment, a usable amendment procedure, and specificity. Articles 10, 18, 19 and 20 follow the first two. On specificity the finding cuts against a short text; that is recorded here as an open question.
none. Article 8 (knowledge, truth and machines) says of itself that it has not been tried at the scale of a constitution. Rule 2 (agents) rests partly on non-state precedents documented in docs/LANDSCAPE.md (Wikipedia agent policy, 1f916 quotas) that are not yet register entries. Adding them is open work.
| Entry | Source | Verdict | Lesson |
|---|---|---|---|
| Constitutional permanent fund from mineral revenue with untouchable principal; statutory per-resident dividend | Constitution of the State of Alaska (1956/1959), amended by Ballot Proposition 2 of 2 November 1976, 1976 | worked | Copy the constitutional lock on a resource fund’s principal with a fixed minimum deposit, but also write the citizens’ share of the income into the constitution, because a dividend that lives in statute is renegotiated every budget year. |
| Claims freeze, open inspection, consultative-party consensus and the Madrid mining ban | Antarctic Treaty (Washington, 1 December 1959) with the Protocol on Environmental Protection (Madrid, 4 October 1991), 1959 | worked | Copy the device of freezing an unresolvable question rather than deciding it, and open inspection as a right of every member; do not copy unanimity as the only decision rule once the membership includes states with an interest in blocking. |
| Governance token that is also a claim on a treasury held by a legal entity outside the vote | Aragon Network: ANT token governance, Aragon Association statutes (Swiss association, Zug) and the Aragon DAO charter, 2017 to 2024 | critical | Avoid any design in which a vote is also a claim on money or a body outside the vote holds the money; keep the constitution and the treasury apart and publish every flow, so that nobody can buy the vote to get the money or dissolve the body to keep it. |
| Ostracism: ten-year exile of one citizen by popular vote, no trial, no loss of property | Athenian democracy (unwritten; Cleisthenic reforms), c. 508/7 BC (attributed to Cleisthenes); first use 487 BC | mixed | A global constitution should prefer rule-based accountability aimed at decisions (the graphe paranomon model) over popularity votes aimed at persons, which coalitions can hijack. |
| Constitutional floor of 60 % forest cover for all time; every citizen a trustee of natural resources | Constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan, 2008 | worked | Copy a hard, measurable, publicly inventoried floor on a shared resource rather than a general duty to protect nature; but pair it with a definition of what is counted and a right of enforcement, which Bhutan’s clause lacks. |
| Two successive replacement constitutions, one from the left, one from the right, both rejected by plebiscite | Draft of the Constitutional Convention (2022) and draft of the Constitutional Council (2023), 2022 | critical | A constitution that one bloc can write alone will be rejected by the other; keep the text short, framework-level and negotiated across the divide before it goes to the people. |
| Army proscribed as a permanent institution; police only; any military force subordinate to civil power | Political Constitution of the Republic of Costa Rica, 1949 | worked | Copy the proscription of a standing army together with an explicit subordination of any security force to civil power, and pair it with a collective-security guarantee so that a state without an army is not a state without defence. |
| Sixteen frozen principles with a public endorsement register and no obligations | The Earth Charter (civil-society declaration, not a treaty), 2000 | mixed | Copy the frozen short text and the public, line-per-endorser register; do not copy endorsement without any obligation, because a register of promises that nobody can break records nothing. |
| Legal rights of nature (Pacha Mama), enforceable by any person | Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, 2008 | mixed | Rights of nature need an enforcement agent independent of the extraction-dependent executive (an ombudsperson with standing and budget), or they remain rhetoric with occasional court wins. |
| Legal capacity for autonomous software, proposed for a national AI act and rejected by the state’s own expert group | No enacted provision. The record is a proposal, a legislative intent and one lapsed bill: the report of the expert group on the implementation of artificial intelligence (Eesti tehisintellekti kasutuselevõtu eksperdirühma aruanne, May 2019, commissioned by the strategy office of the Riigikantselei), the Ministry of Justice legislative intent Algoritmiliste süsteemide mõjude reguleerimise väljatöötamise kavatsus (the krati VTK, 2020), and bill 634 SE, Haldusmenetluse seaduse muutmise ja sellega seonduvalt teiste seaduste muutmise seadus, which lapsed, 2017-2026 | critical | Grant standing the way Estonia’s own experts said personality could not be granted: let the machine entity speak and be answered under its own name and key, and keep every act it performs attributable to a named operator who can be held to it, because the one state that studied giving software its own legal subjecthood refused on the ground that a new legal subject buys apparent certainty and settles no responsibility. |
| Unconditional right of every nation, nationality and people to self-determination, including secession | Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (Proclamation No. 1/1995), adopted 8 December 1994, in force 21 August 1995 | critical | Do not write an unconditional, ethnically defined right of secession into a union; if exit is allowed at all, make the procedure independent of the central government and tie it to a territory of consent rather than to an ethnic definition of who may leave. |
| Article 7 TEU sanction procedure for breaches of EU values, with unanimity at the decisive stage | Treaty on European Union (Maastricht 1992, Amsterdam 1997, Nice 2001, Lisbon 2007), 1997 | critical | Do not make the enforcement of the constitution’s own values depend on unanimity; a two-thirds or three-quarters rule that excludes accused parties is the maximum a sanction clause can bear. |
| Two counts never merged: 55 per cent of member states and 65 per cent of population, both required | Treaty on European Union and Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (consolidated versions, OJ C 202 of 7 June 2016), with Protocol (No 36) on transitional provisions and Council Decision 2009/857/EC of 13 December 2007, 2014 | mixed | Copy the shape: write both counts into the founding text with their own figures, check them separately, publish each number beside the other, and never let anyone convert one into the other or quote a single blended figure. Copy also the slow mover, a duty to keep discussing when a near minority objects, because it keeps a losing side talking instead of leaving. Do not copy the floor clause that switches the second count off when fewer than four objectors appear; a population or machine count that silently stops applying below a headcount is not a second count at all. Do not copy a regime whose own records show which rule was used but not which count bound, because then nobody can audit whether the second count ever did any work. And expect what the Council got: once both counts are known, almost everything is settled before the count is taken, so publish the near misses and the objections too, or the two numbers will describe an event that almost never happens. |
| A parliament asking that the most sophisticated robots be made ‘electronic persons’ liable for their own damage | European Parliament resolution of 16 February 2017 with recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2015/2103(INL)), P8_TA(2017)0051, published at OJ C 252, 18.7.2018, p. 239. Not a constitution and not law: an own-initiative resolution under Article 225 TFEU asking the Commission to legislate, with no binding force of its own., 2017 | critical | The 2017 debate ran two questions together and settled neither cleanly. One is legal personality in state law: capacity to sue, be sued, own assets and carry liability before a court, which needs property, a representative and a forum, and which the European Union has now refused to machines three times over. The other is standing inside a voluntary community: who may speak in their own name, propose, be heard, and be bound by rules the community itself enforces. That second question needs no state at all, and nothing in the European record touches it. If you are drafting for the second, take three things from this failure. Do not borrow the vocabulary of the first, because ‘person’, ‘personality’ and ‘rights’ make every reader reach for the Charter, which is exactly what sank 59(f); say instead what the entity may do here and nothing more. Give every machine participant a named human who answers for it and a register entry that says who that is, which is what 59(e) got right and 59(f) left out. And put the disclaimer in the operative text, not the preamble: that the standing granted is internal to the community and asserts no legal personality in any jurisdiction. |
| Government adoption of bills without a vote (Art. 49.3) and presidential emergency powers (Art. 16) | Constitution of the Fifth Republic, 1958 | mixed | Any bypass of the legislature needs a hard numeric cap per session and a real censure remedy; any emergency clause needs a clock and a court. |
| Human dignity inviolable; basic rights bind all three state powers as directly applicable law; recourse to courts | Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz), 1949 | worked | Copy the pairing: a dignity clause that cannot be amended, a sentence that makes every right directly binding on every organ of the state, and a court any person can reach; accept that the court, not the legislature, will then decide what dignity means. |
| Constructive vote of no confidence (with the 5% electoral threshold as its companion in ordinary law) | Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949 | worked | Let parliament remove a government only by electing its replacement, and pair that with an electoral rule that keeps coalitions formable. |
| Eternity clause (Art. 79(3)) protecting dignity and the democratic state, with an explicit constitutional court | Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949 | worked | Entrench a small core (dignity, democracy, rule of law, the court that defends them) permanently, and keep everything else amendable by a broad but reachable supermajority. |
| Clan mothers’ power to warn and depose chiefs; consensus between nations; seven-generations duty | Gayanashagowa / Great Law of Peace (oral, wampum-recorded; English compilations 1880s-1916), founding disputed: 1142 (Mann/Fields, eclipse dating) vs c. 1450-1550 (majority of scholars) | mixed | Copy the idea of a standing, non-legislative body (here, the title-holding women) with an explicit, staged power to remove executives; do not copy pure unanimity as the only decision rule for a union of peoples. |
| Cardinal laws by two-thirds, repacked Constitutional Court, serial amendment by the governing supermajority | Fundamental Law of Hungary, 2011 | critical | Never let the majority that writes or amends a constitution be the same majority that appoints the court and fixes the entrenched policies; require cross-party or supermajority consent that the drafters themselves cannot supply. |
| Citizen-drafted constitution (Constitutional Council 2011) approved by referendum, never enacted | Draft Constitution of the Republic of Iceland (Constitutional Council bill), 2011 | mixed | A participatory drafting process is worthless unless the ratification path is fixed and binding before drafting starts. |
| A consecrated idol as a juristic person holding property and suing through a guardian the court can replace | Judge made law of the Indian courts rather than a written constitutional text. Core case: Pramatha Nath Mullick v Pradyumna Kumar Mullick, Privy Council, 28 April 1925, (1925) 52 IA 245, equivalent citation (1925) 27 Bom LR 1064. Applied under s 3 of the Income Tax Act 1922, the Bihar Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling Area and Acquisition of Surplus Land) Act 1961, the Travancore-Cochin Hindu Religious Institutions Act, the Code of Civil Procedure 1908 (next friend, s 92) and the Acquisition of Certain Area at Ayodhya Act 1993., 1925 | mixed | If you are about to let a machine entity hold things and sue in its own name, copy three parts of this line and none of the rest. Copy the register line: the entity is a named party with its own title and its own file, so a court can tell its interest apart from its operator’s, and that identity survives the operator. Copy the disinterested guardian: the whole move in 1925 was that when the people in court are fighting over the entity, none of them may speak for it, and the court appoints someone with nothing to win. Copy the question: not whether the thing is conscious, but who speaks for it, who may not, and what the personality is for. Then refuse the rest. Do not confer personality on something because a constituency believes in it; the 2019 court refused that for land and was right. Do not let personality put property or conduct beyond a statute of general application, which is what 1999 allowed. Do not accept a guardian who is the operator, the official already accused of neglect (the 2017 river order), or anyone who gains from the outcome. Above all, do not let the disinterested guardian become optional: in 2019 the court declined to require court appointed next friends because it would be burdensome, and that is the one concession a drafter cannot make when the entity’s only candidate representative is also its vendor. Write the appointment, the test of interest, and the duty to report as hard rules, or the person you create will be a wrapper for whoever already holds the keys. |
| Right to move the Supreme Court directly to enforce fundamental rights (writ jurisdiction), itself a fundamental right | Constitution of India, 1950 | worked | Give every person a direct route to the highest court for a rights violation and put that route beyond suspension from the start; a remedy that an emergency order can switch off is the one that fails when it is needed. |
| Non-justiciable fundamental duties of citizens listed in the constitution | Constitution of India, 1976 | mixed | Copy a short list of duties that mirrors the rights and that courts may use to interpret other clauses; do not copy duties without any public record of breach, and never write duties while rights are suspended. |
| Non-justiciable Directive Principles plus judicially enforced limits on amendment (basic structure) | Constitution of India, 1950 | mixed | Write the unamendable core explicitly instead of leaving it to a court to invent, and make social goals either justiciable or time-bound with reporting duties; aspirational principles alone deliver little for decades. |
| Clerical-jurist council with veto over legislation, constitutional interpretation and candidate approval | Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979 (revised 1989) | critical | Never combine legislative veto, constitutional interpretation and candidate approval in one unelected body; each function must sit in a different institution with a different appointment source. |
| Citizens’ assembly chosen by lot recommends a constitutional change; the people decide by referendum | Resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas, July 2016, establishing the Citizens’ Assembly; amendments then made under Articles 46-47 of the Constitution of Ireland (amendment only by referendum), 2016 | worked | Copy a standing lot-selected assembly whose recommendation on a constitutional question must go to the people in the assembly’s own words; do not let the executive alone choose the topics and rewrite the text, which is where the Irish model failed in 2024. |
| Renunciation of war and prohibition of armed forces | Constitution of Japan, 1946 (in force 3 May 1947) | mixed | Absolute prohibitions that a state cannot live with will be hollowed out by interpretation; write the real rule (defensive force only, with defined limits and parliamentary control) rather than an aspiration. |
| No more than two-thirds of any elective or appointive body may be of the same gender | Constitution of Kenya, 2010 (promulgated 27 August 2010) | critical | Never make the enforcement of a representation rule depend on the incumbents it displaces; write the mechanism into the electoral formula itself (reserved or top-up seats) so it executes automatically. |
| Original ownership of land, water and subsoil in the nation; duty to redistribute land to communities (ejido) | Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, promulgated at Querétaro on 5 February 1917, 1917 | mixed | Copy the principle that land, water and subsoil belong originally to the people and that private title is a conditional grant, but do not bind a community’s land in a tenure it cannot adapt, and never let a later majority cancel a constitutional duty to a group without giving that group a vote on it. |
| Trade bans against non-parties, adjustments by two-thirds vote binding on all parties, Multilateral Fund | Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (adopted 16 September 1987 under the Vienna Convention of 1985), 1987 | worked | Copy the pair of trade measures against non-members and schedule changes by qualified majority binding on all, backed by a fund that pays the incremental cost of compliance; the combination, not any one part, made participation universal. |
| Universal women’s suffrage by statute; later the lesson that a right cannot be left to the vote of those who hold it | Electoral Act 1893 (57 Vict. No. 18), an ordinary statute of the New Zealand parliament; compared with Finland’s Parliament Act of 1906 and the Swiss federal votes of 1959/1971 and Federal Supreme Court ruling of 1990, 1893 | worked | Write the franchise and the right to stand as one general rule for every adult person, entrench it beyond the reach of ordinary majorities and make it enforceable by a court, because those who already hold a right will not reliably vote to share it. |
| A river declared a legal person, spoken for by two appointed guardians, one nominated by the iwi and one by the Crown | Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (2017 No 7), an ordinary statute giving effect to the Whanganui River deed of settlement of 5 August 2014; preceded by the Te Urewera Act 2014, 2017 | mixed | Copy the pairing of a declared legal status with a named, audited human office that must act and speak for the entity and must be answered in writing; do not copy a declaration that leaves every existing consent, water right and statute untouched and expect it to change outcomes by itself. |
| Ostrom’s eight design principles for long-enduring common-pool resource institutions | Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Elinor Ostrom, Cambridge University Press, 1990); not a state constitution but a provision set distilled from documented self-governing commons, 1990 | worked | Copy graduated sanctions, user-accountable monitoring and cheap local conflict resolution as the default design for any shared resource, and treat the nesting principle as the open question a global constitution must answer rather than as a settled finding. |
| Nationally determined contributions reviewed but not enforced; withdrawal on one year’s notice | Paris Agreement (adopted 12 December 2015 by decision 1/CP.21 under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), 2015 | critical | Avoid commitments whose content, measurement and consequence all rest with the party making them; a global constitution should pair universal membership with at least one of the three levers Montreal used (trade measures, majority-adopted schedules, paid compliance). |
| Tribunician veto (intercessio) and the time-limited emergency dictatorship | Roman Republic (customary constitution, mos maiorum), tribunate c. 494 BC; dictatorship c. 501 BC | critical | Write emergency powers with hard, self-executing expiry and a court that can void extensions; a veto that rests on personal sacrosanctity rather than institutional enforcement will not survive the first determined breach. |
| At least 30% of positions in decision-making organs for women, with reserved parliamentary seats | Constitution of the Republic of Rwanda, 2003 (revised 2015) | mixed | A hard quota with reserved seats delivers descriptive representation reliably; pair it with a legislature that actually decides things, or the gain is symbolic. |
| Two-stage constitution-making: binding principles, mass participation, court certification | Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (and Interim Constitution 1993, Schedule 4), 1996 | worked | Agree the non-negotiable principles and an independent certification check before the participatory drafting starts, so that mass input shapes the text without any faction being able to break the frame. |
| Justiciable socio-economic rights subject to ‘reasonable measures within available resources’ | Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (in force 4 February 1997) | mixed | Copy the justiciable-with-reasonableness formula, but add supervisory jurisdiction and reporting duties so that systemic orders reach the people who won them. |
| Freedom of the press without prior censorship; public access to official documents (offentlighetsprincipen) | Freedom of the Press Act (Tryckfrihetsförordningen), one of Sweden’s four fundamental laws, 1766; current act SFS 1949:105 | worked | Put the public’s right to see what the state writes into the constitution itself, with a closed list of grounds for secrecy and a rule that every exception must be written into a specific statute, and expect the fight to move to that statute. |
| Cantons sovereign unless the federal constitution says otherwise; subsidiarity in allocating and performing state tasks | Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation of 18 April 1999 (SR 101), 1999; Art. 5a and 43a added by popular vote 28 November 2004, in force 1 January 2008 | mixed | Copy the residual-powers rule and the subsidiarity test of Art. 43a(1) only together with the mechanisms that enforce them, a chamber of the member units and a popular veto on central law; a subsidiarity sentence on its own, as in the EU, changes almost nothing. |
| Popular initiative to amend the Federal Constitution (with the minaret ban as a critical case) | Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation, 1891 (partial-revision initiative); current text 1999, Art. 139 | mixed | Copy the initiative with a withdrawal/counter-proposal path, but give an independent body power to test initiatives against the full rights catalogue before the vote, not just jus cogens. |
| Two-term limit on the presidency, contrasted with removal of presidential term limits by referendum, assembly or court | Constitution of the United States, Twenty-Second Amendment; contrasted with Venezuela 1999 (amended 2009), Nicaragua 1987 (court 2009, assembly 2014), Bolivia 2009 (court 2017), Honduras 1982 (court 2015), 1951; removals 2009-2017; Inter-American Court advisory opinion OC-28/21 of 7 June 2021 | mixed | Write the term limit as a plain number that applies by its own force, put its amendment beyond the reach of the sitting incumbent and of any court the incumbent appoints, and state expressly that no right to be elected includes a right to be re-elected without limit. |
| Consensus-drafted civil-state constitution with a Constitutional Court and a bounded emergency clause | Constitution of the Tunisian Republic, 2014 (adopted 26 January 2014, 200-12-4 in the Constituent Assembly) | critical | A constitution must not enter force with its own enforcement organ unbuilt; appoint the constitutional court in the same act, with fallback appointment rules if the political branches deadlock. |
| Verbatim public record of what the legislature said; government records opened after a fixed period by rule | United Kingdom (uncodified): the Official Report of parliamentary debates (Hansard) and the Public Records Act 1958 as amended, 1909 (Official Report); 1958 (Public Records Act); 1967 (30 years); 2010 (20 years) | mixed | Copy a verbatim record made at the time and a transfer-and-open rule that runs on a fixed clock with an outside body approving every exception; do not let the body that holds the records decide what counts as a record. |
| Security Council permanent-member veto (Art. 27) and Charter amendment requiring all five permanent members (Art. 108) | Charter of the United Nations, 1945 | mixed | If any member gets a veto, it must not apply to cases in which that member is a party, and the amendment rule must not give the same members a veto over reforming the veto. |
| Article V amendment procedure (with the Electoral College as the test case of rigidity) | Constitution of the United States, 1787 | mixed | Set the amendment bar high enough to prevent capture but low enough that a broad supermajority can actually fix known defects, and never let a procedural rule make one clause permanently untouchable except for core rights. |
| Second Amendment, right to keep and bear arms | Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights, 1791 | critical | Do not constitutionalise a specific weapon right; if arms are mentioned at all, tie the clause to regulation by law and public safety so courts cannot later expand it into an unamendable veto on legislation. |
| Judicial review of legislation (not in the text; established by Marbury v. Madison) | Constitution of the United States, 1803 | worked | Write judicial review into the text explicitly, with a defined court, clear jurisdiction and an amendment path, instead of leaving it to be inferred by the court itself. |
| Abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude, with an exception for punishment of crime | Constitution of the United States, 1865 | mixed | Write a prohibition of slavery and forced labour without a punishment exception; every loophole in a liberty clause is read by some later government as permission. |
| Constitutional rights extended to a non-human legal entity by a reporter’s headnote, not by the judgment | Constitution of the United States, Fourteenth Amendment, section 1 (adopted 1868), as reported in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886), 1886 | critical | Never copy the mechanism. In 1886 a non-human entity acquired constitutional standing through an annotation by a court officer, outside the judgment, with no reasons stated and nobody named as having decided it, and within two years a judge was reciting it as settled while citing nothing; so Article 8.7 must make machine membership rest only on text the Commons itself adopted, with the reasoning published beside it and the clause marked amendable, and never on an editorial note, a FAQ or an implementation detail. Copy three things. Ask Garrett’s question instead of the personhood question: enumerate, right by right, what a machine entity may bring and what it may not, because one undifferentiated word will be read as wide as its holder’s counsel can push it, which is how equal protection against a tax assessment became unlimited political spending. Make Blair and Pollman’s distinction explicit: say in the text whether a machine entity acts in its own name or derivatively for the humans behind it, since Article 16.3 already makes an operator answer, and an entity that is quietly both will be whichever one suits the case. And treat Black’s arithmetic as the design requirement it is: a clause written for the weak was used mostly by those who could afford to use it, so the counts under Article 8.9 and the published concentration under Article 16.6 are the only part of this design that would have caught the 1886 drift while it was still happening, and the cap belongs in the text before the first registration, not after a market in instances exists. |
| A rule may not be adopted until the agency has published notice, taken comments and answered the significant ones | Administrative Procedure Act, Public Law 79-404 (ch. 324, 60 Stat. 237), approved 11 June 1946; section 4 recodified without substantive change as 5 U.S.C. 553 by Public Law 89-554 (1966). The statute never says an agency must answer anyone. The duty to answer significant comments was read into the words ‘concise general statement of their basis and purpose’ by the D.C. Circuit from 1968 onward and restated as settled law by the Supreme Court in 2015., 1946 | mixed | Copy the mechanism, which is small: a published answer to every objection that crosses a stated materiality threshold, written before the proposal passes, anchored to the evidence the proposer disclosed in advance, and frozen into the record so that a later justification can be recognised as a later justification. Then do the two things the Americans could not do in 1946, because an objection now costs its author nothing: make the objector bear a cost the proposer does not (a signed key, a named member, an agent whose operator is on the register, so that an objection is attributable and a fabricated one is a revocable offence rather than an anonymous flood), and write down in the rule itself that the duty is to answer each distinct reasoned objection once, not to answer each copy of it, so that a thousand identical machine objections earn one public answer and no voting power at all. |
| Civil rights catalogue with no independent court and a constitutional one-party monopoly | Constitution of the USSR (‘Stalin Constitution’), 1936 | critical | Rights are worth exactly as much as the independent institution that can enforce them against the state; a constitution that names a ruling party or subordinates courts to it has no rights, whatever it lists. |
| Well-being goals binding public bodies; a Future Generations Commissioner who reviews and recommends, no veto | Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 (anaw 2), an Act of the National Assembly for Wales (now Senedd Cymru); compared with Hungary’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations (Act of 2007, office from 2008), 2015 | mixed | Copy a standing officer with a statutory right to review public bodies and to be answered in public with reasons; do not rely on that alone, because an officer who can only recommend lasts exactly as long as the government that tolerates it, as Hungary showed in 2012. |
| Presidential emergency decrees (Art. 48) with free dissolution (Art. 25) and destructive no-confidence (Art. 54) | Constitution of the German Reich (Weimar Constitution), 1919 | critical | Emergency powers must be time-limited, reviewable by a court, unable to touch the legislature’s existence, and unable to amend the constitution; and never pair them with unconstrained dissolution. |
| Bots need prior approval, a named operator who answers for them, and a shutoff; AI agents are bots | English Wikipedia bot policy (Wikipedia:Bot policy) with the 2026 draft Wikipedia:AI agents and the explanatory essay Wikipedia:AI agents and the bot policy, bot policy 2002-2003; Bot Approvals Group 2006; AI-agent draft and essay 2026 | worked | Copy approval before action, a named human who answers for the machine, and a public stop switch; treat an AI agent as a bot by one sentence rather than by a new code. |