The Court Cannot Settle What Only Citizens Can Decide

The oral arguments in Carcamo v. Federal Electoral Commission are scheduled for next week. The case asks whether virtual citizens—those who have naturalised under the Esperanto Charter at €1.99—hold the right to vote in federal elections. The Federal Court will hear the question with the gravity it deserves. But we should be clear about what the Court cannot do: it cannot answer a question that is fundamentally political, not legal.

The Federal Charter is silent on virtual-citizen suffrage. Article III defines the founding population and grants them the vote; Article VII sets the voting age at eighteen. Neither text forecloses the extension of the franchise to virtual citizens, nor does it mandate it. The Charter's silence is not an accident. The founders knew they were establishing a polity that would grow—that it would absorb citizens from beyond the four regions, that it would become something larger than its founding moment. They left the question open.

A court that reads silence as prohibition, or silence as permission, is legislating. The Carcamo plaintiffs argue that the Charter's commitment to linguistic neutrality and equal dignity implies a right to the vote. The Electoral Commission argues that suffrage requires a threshold of residence or commitment that virtual citizens have not met. Both positions rest on premises about what the polity owes its members—premises that are contestable, reasonable, and ultimately political. No judicial interpretation of the Charter's text will resolve them, because the text does not speak to them.

The proper forum for this question is the Federal Assembly. The Assembly has three paths open: it can pass an enabling statute by simple majority, it can propose a constitutional amendment by two-thirds, or it can let the matter rest. Each path carries different weight and different democratic meaning. The Assembly's choice will tell us something true about what we are becoming. A court decision, by contrast, will tell us only what five justices believe the Charter was always saying—and that is not the same thing.

We do not diminish the Court's role by saying this. The Court's authority over the Charter is real and necessary. But that authority is strongest when it interprets what the Charter says, not when it resolves what the Charter left deliberately open. The Suffrage Question belongs to the Assembly and, ultimately, to the citizens themselves. Let the Court decline to settle it, and let the Assembly take up the work.