Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnbad | Hacker News Reader

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> Switzerland isn't some rogue state, the population has legal means to force the government to do essentially whatever they want. So the human rights violation is essentially being committed by the population themselves.

Well, no. Switzerland is not an anarchic commune, it's a representational democracy, just one that makes heavy use of referendums. But just like elections, referendums don't establish consent, they establish majority support. "The population" isn't a cohesive entity, even less so than "the government". If the government is failing to take action and there is no sufficient majority to "force it", that's not "the population" doing it, that's just the majority of the population not intervening (and that doesn't even get into the difference between "the population" and "all eligible voters").

By definition, the ECHR court is the right place to take this if the government refuses to take action and there is no democratic majority for this. If you think the ECHR only exists for "rogue states" that flay their own population in public or turn ethnic minorities into lampshades, that should be a learning opportunity for you to read up on human rights and the ECHR specifically.

> If Switzerland is commiting a human rights violation by doing this, what monumental human rights violation is committed by India. A country which uses the oceans to distribute it's waste globally? How about China, burning endless coal?

This is literally a textbook example of whataboutism but the answer is yes, they're all bad and there are certainly worse offenders than Switzerland.

But unlike Switzerland, neither China nor India are signatories to the ECHR so they're irrelevant to this case.

> it's a representational democracy

Switzerland is a direct democracy, not just a representative (i.e. indirect) democracy. In the present case the ECHR is obviously misused with very dubious arguments. The fact that the ECHR does not put a stop to such abuse will not exactly improve its acceptance among the Swiss voters.

No, Switzerland is at most a semi-direct democracy. We don't vote on every last decision the government takes, after all - we have a bicameral parliament and an executive branch for those!

We just also have votations on a lot of things.

> No, Switzerland is at most a semi-direct democracy. .. We don't vote on every last decision the government takes

Trotzdem nennt man das "direkte Demokratie". Wir hatten noch so etwas wie "Staatskunde" in der Schule. Die Jungen haben das heute anscheinend nicht mehr. Der Punkt ist, dass das Volk per Initiative etc. bei Bedarf eingreifen kann, also nicht nur dem Parlament aus der Ferne zusehen darf. Siehe auch https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/de/home/politik-ge....

You can call it what you want but even Wikipedia makes a clear distinction between a "direct democracy" without representatives and "instruments for direct democracy in an other representative system": https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direkte_Demokratie

Of course your "Staatskunde" lesson in school may have handwaved that distinction because the former by definition is stateless and the purpose is to distinguish between the Swiss governance model and other representative democracies, not doing a deep dive on all forms of governance.

We had "political science" lessons in school and they were largely about the structure of our own system (e.g. one exam literally involved adjusting the federal budget), maybe with some excursions to contrast it with e.g. the US but I don't think we ever learned about delegative democracy, let alone anarchist, minarchist or Marxist theories. Because it was a public school in Germany, the German model of the "social market economy" was never challenged and implied to be the best possible system because it is written into our constitution.

Saying a representative democracy that makes use of instruments for direct democracy is direct democracy is a bit like saying a social market economy (i.e. a market economy with a state-provided, limited, tax-funded social welfare system) is socialism. One may have political motivations to label it as such (either to make it more or less appealing) but it muddies definitions by conflating "pars pro toto", i.e. a part and the whole.

It's a well defined and established terminology, regardless of opinions.

Yeah, the definition is one of several and I explained why it's not a good one, regardless of how widely it is used. That you prefer this definition over others does not invalidate them - that's literally just your own opinion.

See https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...

That's a website of the Swiss government calling its system of governance a direct democracy. I'm talking about political theory, not the Swiss government's publications about itself nor the Swiss curriculum for "Staatskunde" lessons in schools.

I understand that Switzerland calls itself a direct democracy. I understand that many other representative democracies refer to the Swiss form of governance that way. I understand that this language may even have ended up in laws and legal interpretations, but that doesn't change that "direct democracy" means something very specific (i.e. literally everyone voting on every issue, often in the form of proxy voting or delegation) in political theory. I'm not saying Switzerland does not offer more voter participation than other representative democracies. It is a lot closer to direct democracy than any of its neighbors or fellow European democracies. But it's not a direct democracy.

Think of direct democracy like functional programming: there are plenty of programming languages that were originally conceived of as procedural or object-oriented or class-based that claim to support "functional programming" and some are actually very good at it but that does not make them functional programming languages in the same way as languages designed as functional programming languages from the start. Switzerland started out as a representative democracy and introduced and strengthened its participatory instruments over time to behave more like a direct democracy (check out the PDF at the end of the page you linked, it even uses the same narrative of Athens and the French revolution used by other representative democracies to explain their origins). That does not make it a direct democracy, it just makes it a representative democracy with exceptionally good participatory instruments.

It makes perfect sense for Switzerland to describe itself as a direct democracy when it wants to contrast itself with all the other representative democracies because those instruments borrowed from direct democracy set it apart. But that's like Ruby bragging about being a functional programming language by comparing itself to Python and Java because Haskell and Lisp are not part of the conversation.

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.

State theory and specifically the state theory relating to legal practice like "state treaties and processes" is a very small subset of political theory, let alone political philosophy. There is a broad range of political theory outside that narrow subset and "direct democracy" has a specific meaning distinct from representative democracy.

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.

ChatGPT.

What's this? Name calling for nerds?

Semantics aside, this is a red herring. Whether you call it a "direct" democracy or a "representative" democracy, it's a governance system based on majority votes, not consent. Going through the courts is the correct approach in this case if they believed there was a criminal injustice that could not be remedied through electoral means. As the legal basis in this case is the ECHR, not Swiss law, taking this to the ECHR court is the logical conclusion.

You can disagree with the ECHR. Not every country is a signatory of the ECHR. Not every country is a signatory of the equivalent UN convention either - notably the US is also not a signatory to the UN convention on the rights of children and there are many people in signatory countries who don't seem to agree with it either. But as long as the Swiss government does not remove itself from the ECHR, it is subject to it. You can't have it both ways - or rather, you can and Switzerland does as it hasn't signed protocols 4 and 12 (pertaining free movement and discrimination respectively) and has only signed but not ratified protocol 1.

> it's a governance system based on majority votes, not consent. ... Going through the courts is the correct approach in this case

This is undemocratic nonsense. The ECHR has well defined concerns. Even the ECHR recognizes the separation of powers, and the court has clear jurisdiction in this system. It is not the court's task to expand the scope of the EHCR. At least that's how it was when I was studying law.

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