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by Rochus
804 days ago
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Lost in terminology. These may all be interesting trains of thought, but they have little to do with the state treaties and processes at hand, which are based on agreed terminology (insofar as human language allows such a thing at all) and which are the reference for the assessment of the case at hand. If you are interested in the subject, you should study the works of established state theorists. Wikipedia is a rather dubious source for a scientific discussion of a topic. |
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Redefining it as a subset of representative democracy through the introduction of participatory processes makes sense when talking in a context where representative democracies are taken for granted but it is extremely unhelpful when talking in a broader scope where representative democracies are merely one of many categories of systems. There's a reason the PDF references the French Revolution rather than the Paris Commune and describes democracy merely in a (largely ahistorical TBH) European context informed by the Enlightenment era and limits the idea of decentralisation to the federalism of cantons rather than exploring it further: it's not about analysis, it's about creating a national mythology and a historical narrative that has the present system as an inevitable end state that can only be built upon but not fundamentally changed.
And all of this is really a red herring because the original argument was about whether the system Switzerland has makes it unnecessary to appeal to a super-national court in order to force a decision. And given that referendums and public initiatives still require a majority in order to pass the answer is clearly no.
Given that the claim is that the (in)action of the Swiss government accelerates/intensifies the climate catastrophe and that this effectively violates the human rights of a minority group (i.e. seniors are more likely to die from severe weather events like heatwaves) and that referendums have not helped change the (in)action of the government, a referendum is the wrong instrument as the question is not what the majority wants but whether a minority has their fundamental rights violated.
You can argue that the ECHR court was wrong to agree that this is a violation of the rights asserted by the ECHR. You can argue that Switzerland should leave the ECHR and replace it with a different human rights bill - and assuming you have the requisite legal status in Switzerland you can even attempt to force this question with a public initiative. You could also simply argue that they should have sued the Swiss government in a Swiss court of law first (I'm not sure how the Federal Supreme Court works but presumably the process would be a bit more involved) before taking this to an international level. But the ECHR court is ultimately the right addressee when arguing a signatory's violation of the ECHR, "direct" democracy or not.