Your honor,

Election Act 7.5 defines sensible restrictions on cosmopolitan players holding potentially conflicting offices in foreign regions and organizations:

(5) No person holding a Cabinet office or the office of the Delegate may hold any equivalent office in a foreign region or organisation.

Next to my main affiliation in the South Pacific, I am also the "First Warden" in the Order of the Grey Wardens, which is a dedicated and unentangled military organization with an autocratic structure. The First Warden is leader of that military organization (see here).

My question is - if a member of the South Pacific holds the position of "First Warden", which of the four cabinet offices in the South Pacific (Prime Minister, Minister of Regional Affairs, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Military Affairs) are they permitted to hold without resigning their position in that military organization?

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Your honor,

I wish to provide some context to my question.

Election Act 7.5 was written deliberately imprecise; in most cases where such cosmopolitanism takes place, other regions have offices with the same or similar names, and the de facto differences between similar offices across regions are minute enough such that it is intuitively clear to a reasonable person that these would constitute equivalent offices. A clear example of equivalence is the Ministry of Regional Affairs in our great region, as compared to the Minister of Culture in our sister feeder The North Pacific.

A military organization such as the Wardens, however, is inherently different from the coalition government. There is no formal set of laws; rather decisions are made ad-hoc by the Commanders (with final power resting within the First Warden). Investments in Culture and Integration serve to attain and retain soldiers. Foreign Affairs are kept to a minimum. Additional programs serve to further the military goals.

While deliberating potential runs for cabinet offices in the next general election scheduled next month, I noticed that it isn't always intuitively clear which office would be a conflict for me or not, and there is no case law to set precedent. The issue is, as I see it, revolves around whether the leader of a dedicated military organization is considered to be functionally equivalent to our head of cabinet or our Minister of Military Affairs, or even both (as there is certainly overlap with both positions). I did not see an equivalence with either MoRA or MoFA.

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Given the political rather than legal nature of this question it is the opinion of this court that it is not justiciable.

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