Bills

Proposed amendments to this constitution, from the moment they are drafted. The bill file is the instrument: the before-and-after a bill publishes here is the same comparison made when it is applied, so what the approving bodies read is exactly what lands in the text.

Every bill needs the approval of the board, the intermediate board and the units under Article 16(3). Bills that were rejected, withdrawn or lapsed stay on this page. A legislature's failed bills are part of its record — what was proposed and refused says as much as what was carried, and a register that quietly drops them is a register that only ever agrees with itself.

No bills before the board

Nothing has been introduced. That is the ordinary state of this register between amendments, not a page that failed to load — every instrument already enacted is on the amendment register.

Any member may propose one, and what they write is the instrument itself:

  1. Open the constitution and change what you want changed. Every provision is editable in place; the page works out precisely which ones you touched and what each would say afterwards.
  2. Read your own before-and-after. It is what the approval meetings will read — not your explanation of it.
  3. Download your proposal and email it to the ICC, which numbers it at submission and coordinates the approvals of all three bodies under Article 16(3).

Writing the file by hand is fully supported and produces exactly the same thing: process/AUTHORING-BY-HAND.md and bills/TEMPLATE.yaml. Clerking one: the ICC desk.

Approval under Article 16(3)

Article 16(3): All proposed amendments must be approved by a 2/3rd present and voting of the board, the intermediate board and units of the NGO collectively.

All three bodies are required. This is fixed constitutional policy, not a default setting: a checklist, tool or shortcut that enacts on fewer than three approvals is invalid on its face, whatever convenience recommends it. The ICC coordinates and records the approvals of all three — the Acts of 2024 recorded only the ICC's own assent, which is the gap this pipeline closes for good.

"Collectively" is genuinely ambiguous. It can mean a pooled vote of all three bodies sitting together, or two thirds within each body separately. The board has not adopted a reading. Until it does by resolution, enactment requires the stricter one — at least two thirds of those present and voting in each of the three bodies, taken separately — and every bill records both tallies, so the record satisfies whichever reading is eventually adopted. Abstentions are excluded from the denominator, because the Article says present and voting. The choice between the readings is pending.

Meeting mechanics are not decided here. Notice, quorum and how a vote is taken belong to the by-laws under Article 16(2). This register records who was present and how they voted; it does not invent a quorum rule the constitution does not state.

How a bill becomes an Act

The bill file is the source of truth and the signed PDF is a rendering of it. The three Acts of 2024 went the other way — prose first, applied to the machine-readable text by hand afterwards — and that is what produced a half-applied constitution, an application nobody recorded, and an Act that could not safely be re-run. An amendment drafted here is machine-applicable from the moment it exists, so applying it is a comparison rather than a transcription.

  1. draft — with its mover, unnumbered. It is not yet before anyone.
  2. submitted — lodged with the ICC, which assigns the number: Bill 1 of 2026, per year.
  3. under review — the ICC reads the drafting. It may be returned for revision and resubmitted, as often as that takes.
  4. scheduled — listed for the approval meetings of the board, the intermediate board and the units.
  5. approved or rejected — on the tallies recorded above, under Article 16(3).
  6. enacted — assented to and signed. The Act takes its own number at enactment: Act 1 of 2026, per year.
  7. applied — written into the constitution, which takes the new version. Because each operation carries the complete resulting text, applying the same Act twice changes nothing the second time.

A mover may withdraw a bill at any time before approval. The board may record one as lapsed; that is set by hand, because the constitution states no time limit and this pipeline does not invent one.

Every applied Act bumps the minor version. Major is reserved for a full revision, which is also the only instrument that may renumber a provision — article numbers are permanent citation handles. There are no patch releases of provision text: an editorial edit without an instrument is exactly what this system exists to prevent.

The rules in full: process/AMENDMENT-PROCESS.md. For authors: process/PROPOSING.md, and process/AUTHORING-BY-HAND.md with bills/TEMPLATE.yaml for anyone writing the file directly.