Copyright 091006 by Home Rule Globally

Free license if published with credit and copy to copyright owner within one month from publication

Many legal systems comprise a criminal law system providing threats of punishment for those violating rules, plus a restitution system aimed at seeking to hold harmless the innocent victims of wrongful acts. Remote ancestors recognized such intuitive justice and relied significantly upon individual integrity for assuring such restitution. Only the politicians and the friends of the politicians benefit from the criminal justice segment of governance entities. Widespread support for restitution systems prevails except among those significantly submissive to politicians. Because many diplomats are merely the stooges for the politicians and the Establishments manipulating the politicians, many can be expected to oppose any proposal for a Global Restitution Court. However, at the grass roots the common sense of the masses might endorse at least some of the concepts for a proposal for a new dispute termination system that might be labeled as a Global Restitution Court.

Such would be extremely different from a Global Criminal Court. Discussion about a Global Restitution Court merits attention completely without regard to the relative probabilities of its adoption, but because it permits a reevaluation of the institutional matrix from different perspectives.

Nations and areas not parties to this Treaty shall be unaffected by it because traditional international law is presumed to continue. This treaty aspires to decrease both military hostilities and terrorism, while prolonging the legitimacy of international warfare in accordance with the rules of war. All of the spirit of the Briand-Kellogg Pact, obligating each nation to utilize its military capacity only for defensive and never for aggressive purposes, is incorporated as an obligation of this treaty. Such Pact imposes upon a nation an obligation to utilize its national military capacity exclusively for defensive purposes only.

Such pact imposes sanctions, penalties, etc. upon violators. The threat of death penalty for violators was confirmed by the execution of some Japanese warlords for their invasion of Manchuria. Partly because such hangings were 18 years after the offense, some have skepticism about the significant effectiveness of such attempt to prohibit aggression by national armies by criminalizing it. Hence the pact had trivial deterrence effect. Such pact has been interpreted as the maximum of criminalization deterrence of military hostilities within the treaty system.

The Global Restitution Court would seek to add restitution deterrence to criminal deterrence by imposing upon any entity using military violence to use it so precisely as to injure only those justifiably meriting military punishment and avoiding any innocent victims.

The significant purpose of this treaty is to supplement by restitution deterrence for minimizing not merely international warfare but any and all damage from other military hostilities such as terrorism. This treaty concerns all military hostilities, which can be broadly defined as overt hostilities involving: [a] a plurality of individuals; and/or [b] weapons capable of injuring a plurality of individuals during a brief time such as a minute. Thus terrorism, or militarism outside the rules or war, is treated as within the generic scope of group violence. It is distinguishable from the self-protection with constabulary weapons.

Individual violence with constabulary weapons is thus clearly outside the scope of military hostilities. All psychological, sociological, economic, monetary, etc. pressures involving no significant overt violence, including hunger strikes, protests of less than 300 individuals, are explicitly excluded from military hostilities under this treaty.

Although oppressed peoples might have appropriate privileges of using strictly non-violent protests within a nation ratifying this treaty, no right of oppressed people to any use of military violence is recognized. This treaty essentially rejects the doctrine clarified in the Declaration of Independence of the right of an oppressed people to violently rebel.

Although new nations can be established, such status of a governance entity as a nation shall require recognition by nations aggregating two categories of 25 nations each. One category would concern nations whose Gross National Product aggregates at least 25% of Gross World Product using data not more than 5 nor less than 3 years ago. Such GNP would prolong the clout of wealthy nations. The clout of smaller nations would be enhanced by the requirement for at least 25 nations. Some of the ambiguities about whether international law grants national status to a new entity would be clarified by such a double 25 standard. This reverses a past pattern of letting major nations domination when a new nation should be recognized.

Those recognizing that new nation status required recognition by the two groups of 25 nations would appreciate that 20th century tactics were no longer relevant. Under the treaty, a nation shall hereafter be recognized as a nation only if it has at least five Provinces or at least 15,000 population. Local autonomy, as distinguished from centralized national fascism, can thus be injected into the process of recognition of a new nation.

This Treaty establishes six Continental Rosters of Restitution Judges, consisting of all ethical, healthy, alert judges who have for at least one year served as judges in tribunals administered by Provinces and/or governments having a constituency less than the constituency of a nation, and who have not served as Ambassadors, diplomats, judges in international courts, or judges, legislators, or cabinet members of national governments. Each member of a Restitution Judge Roster shall be deemed to have a significant and adequate knowledge of international law without any the distortions attributable to being victims of specialization in international law.

This treaty is intended to create a jurisprudence system for terminating selected types of disputes. An important objective of dispute termination is to terminate a dispute with appropriately accepted justice both speedily and inexpensively. To the extent that any precedent is recognized, the cost of dispute termination is tremendously increased. Litigation involving application of precedent oftentimes involves the use of experts concerning precedent. Such experts are both costly and time-consuming. Hence, the great emphasis in the Global Restitution Court is upon the minimization of reliance upon precedent and the evaluation of intuitive justice on a case by case basis. One aim is to decrease the cost of and to increase the speed of decisions. However, there are potentialities that in particular instances, or even in averages, it will involve greater delays and/or greater expense than some other jurisprudence systems. Such uniqueness is justified because it imposes upon all who use militarism to successfully avoid creating innocent victims, aiming, insofar as manageable, to punish only those legally punishable by militarism and to minimize the innocent victims of militarism.

All nations participating in the Global Restitution Court agree that the decisions of any valid tribunal of the Global Restitution Court shall be convertible into a judgment of a national court in a manner as significantly simple as the manner in which the decisions of an arbitration board are convertible into court judgments. Substantially all other aspects of the Global Restitution Court stress voluntarism, but coercive enforcement of judgments is assured.

Although military hostilities achieving precisely accurate damage only against unambiguous military targets are unaffected by this treaty. The purpose of this treaty is to impose upon all using military hostilities the unambiguous obligation to pay full damages to any innocent victims without regard to how much care the military might have used in seeking to minimize damages to innocent victims. The liability is absolute if the victim is innocent, without any need for evidence of negligence.

For example, those training individuals to be martyrs for terrorism are obligated under this treaty to hold harmless and pay restitution damages to the innocent victims of such terrorism. If this treaty had prevailed at the time when certain Quaker advocates persuaded Mary Dyer to be a martyr in efforts to induce.

Massachusetts to repeal its law imposing the death penalty for publicizing religious doctrines other than those endorsed by the Massachusetts government, then those who were innocent victims of the death of Mary Dyer would have had a cause of action against those who had taught her to volunteer for such martyrdom. This treaty thus injects the D. C. Stevenson concept that stimulating a voluntary suicide can be murder as a doctrine intended to enhance the deterrence of terrorism. Entities can be held responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their behavior. In the 21st century, the potential damages from any terrorism are so horrendous that unprecedented transformations of jurisprudence are justified in efforts to effectively minimize terrorism, provided that such measures are sufficiently nonviolent.

Some corruption of jurisprudence has arisen from forum-shopping of seeking to locate a tribunal favorable to particular doctrines. One jurisprudence technique for decreasing such problems is postponing any selection of a tribunal until after the litigants and issues are clarified. Responsible judges rescue themselves from disputes in which, for any of many reasons, they feel that they could not fairly decide a dispute. Although the Global Restitution Court seeks to be open-minded concerning what can be litigated, and who can be a judge, litigants would be entitled to file their Complaints, Answers, Stipulations of Facts, Stipulations of issues of fact, Stipulations of issues of doctrines, etc. by merely paying the fees. Then a Continental Court administrator would use lottery to designate a list of 25 candidates from a Continental Roster of all who were healthy, honest, alert, and experienced as trial judges. Such candidate list would be chosen by lottery from a long list of all judges who had served for at least a year as a judge for a provincial or lower level government, etc. The litigants desirably would choose 5 from such list of 25 candidates by successive deletions. If they failed to agree and paid the fees, then the Court Administrator could use lottery to select the panel of 5.

Each of the five judges thus selected would then be notified that the litigants were agreed upon their serving, and they would then have an opportunity to rescue themselves. Each judge would be compensated for the time devoted to the case on the basis of the same hourly rate as that of a national supreme court justice, plus business expenses. Although seeking to avoid the costs of using precedent, the time of all parties and other expenses would be borne strictly by the litigants.

Such cost allocations would be intended to stimulate reasonable conciliatory agreements without any extortions based upon baseless claims. Truly severe penalties would be imposed to minimize any attempts at extortion through inappropriate uses of the procedures.

Once the panel of 5 judges had been selected, the litigation process would be deemed initiated. Each judge would be entitled to interrogate all parties, witnesses, etc. As soon as the five judges had exhausted the times they set for the litigation, each judge would write a preliminary opinion, and evaluate the other four opinions. If at lest four of the five judges could agree upon a decision and opinion, then the procedure would have been successful. Otherwise, the litigation would go back to the stage of the Administrator selecting a new set of 25 candidates.

The intuitive justice of the experienced judges, combined with the requirement for at least 80% agreement among them, is believed to provide appropriate probabilities of achieving tolerable justice on a case by case basis. Through the decades, the dispute terminations by such Global Restitution Court could win widespread acceptance. Any and all jurisprudence has its greatest impact, not because of its authorship, but because of its acceptance. Sometimes a litigant is disgruntled. Because even disgruntled litigants generally accept that a decision terminates litigation among such litigants about such issues, the jurisprudence system serves a critical function in decreasing violence within society. Obviously, the variations about what constitutes justice could arouse dissent, just as there has been lack of perfect uniformity concerning precedent law.

Such a Global Restitution Court might have the impact of decreasing the number of innocent victims of military hostilities, even if there were few if any litigated cases. Such a court would be evaluated, not by its decisions, but by the efforts of militarists to be more precisely avoiding innocent victims.

To the extent that the Global Restitution Court served to alert the world to how much more hazardous terrorism is in the 21st century than in previous centuries, it could help to decrease terrorism within the Treaty System. However, the more important project of launching of a Supra-National Federation is quite independent from what might happen within the treaty system.

By fertilizing a petunia garden, more and better petunias might result, but such efforts to improve are substantially irrelevant if the goal is promoting the blossoming of a tulip. Similarly, no matter what might be done within the treaty system, the launching of a Supra-National Federation should be treated as an independent project that can substantially ignore whatever happens within the treaty system. Effectively minimizing terrorism and/or other military hostilities requires a ratifiable Supra-National Federation, a project independent from and essentially irrelevant from the treaty system. Although Restitution Court might have more than an iota of impact on minimizing terrorism, nothing less than federalization can hope to be effective in adequately decreasing terrorism in the 21st century.