"Yeah, the current idea might be the best we've got, just, it seems like a good thing to be aware of even if we don't actually change anything."

"I expected that; that's most of why we'll have to pay them so well. If there wasn't anything else?"

"That's all she said about it." She looks around the room.

As does Jilia, who also sees nothing, so she continues, "Right, let's vote on yesterday's proposal for performances and a specific board of censors. In favor."

"Ser Jornet, here* is a copy of what we considered yesterday and had people bring away for review, if you didn't get a chance to read the transcript."

*(with the changes from slightly later)

“Aye.”

"Aye."

"For."

"For." Plays are a dumb thing to spend money on, but the Archduchess needs it.

Hopefully this is not spending any state money, which, yes, they don't have.

"Abstain."

"In favor." It sounded kind of like plays were for Shelynites what the Parables are for Erastilians, so, you know, it's fair.

"In favor." He did say he'd do it so he has to do it.

"Passes without objection. I'll bring it to the floor tomorrow. Alright, let's get back to other rights. It's been a while since we did... ordinary business, to the extent that's a meaningful phrase here, so we might want to pass around the long list of potential rights we threw together on the first day. I'd like to look at rights around justice - we had a ban on maledictions, ban on torture or assault as part of interrogations, and the right for executions to be swift and as painless as feasible."

Proposed Rights

- No sumptuary laws, except for criminal impersonation of military, noble, or religious insignia

- No limits on peaceful assembly, in public or otherwise, outside conditions of martial law.

- No limits on peaceful speech, conditions to be decided (martial law, proselytization for banned gods)

- Right to travel freely without needing a travel pass.

- Right to worship any god not of the lower planes.

- Right to justice (clarify?)

- Right to their own person, free from being defiled by force.

- Right to defend themself against assaults on their person,

- Right to retaliate against past assaults on their person significantly later

- Right to have crimes judged by a priest rather than a local noble, or right to appeal crimes to a priest (decide which gods)

- No decrease in punishment for crime from a title or position as a priest (or military officer?), and perhaps an increase in punishment due to the increased responsibility

- Right for farmers to own the land they work.

- Right to divorce. By consent, or if there is no child nor pregnancy, or if a priest hears the dispute and judges it allowed, and possibly unconditionally for wives.

- Right to pilgrimages to temples on holy days

- Right not to punish others except as terms of employment

- Right to preserve family; no intrusion on marriage by lords, no conscription of children

- Right to the proceeds of labor

- Limits on time of indenture or conscription

- Ban on torture

- Right to stay on land even if taxes exceed savings

- Right for victim to carry out punishment (dangerous?)

- Right not to be made undead

- Right to be ransomed when captured

- Ban on maledictions

- Right to hunt and collect firewood in the woods

- Right to good loans (?), and forgiveness for loans seen unfair in a judge's sight

- Right to reasonable food prices in emergencies

- Right to contest and refuse taxes claimed illegally by collectors

- Right to know the status of your family when separated (difficult to do)

- Right to a good baron (?)

- Right to leave Cheliax

- Right to compel a father to marry their child's mother

- Right to choose which currency to be paid in (including in kind)

- Right to form a village militia against the dangers of monsters and outlaws if not competently protected

- Right to keep property (requires care to permit taxes)

- Right to your own thoughts (with some caveats for legitimate investigation)

- Right to attempt to achieve salvation before execution (donations, labor for a Good church, etc.)

- Right not to be compelled to do Evil

- Ban on capital punishment for being an accessory or accomplice

- Right to have undead forms destroyed

- Right to be returned to human if polymorphed

- Right to know your rights (even if illiterate)

- Right of children and mothers not to be abandoned by their fathers (and vice versa where applicable)

- Rights of orphans (extended family before paid orphanages, etc.)

"I had something new I wanted to say about that, but, uh, it might be a little long, and also Delegate Bainilus thought we might want to not have the scribe put it in the transcript, is that okay?"

They're going to write down that you said that, Ferrer.

"Certainly; scribes, if you would step out for a moment, we'll call you back in when it's done."

It feels a little like the walls are closing in around her but this is a stupid and pathetic way to feel so she's going to ignore it. All she is doing is talking, which is not hard. It's not like anything particularly bad even actually happened to her.

"Okay. So. Over the weekend, I got arrested for helping Valia make her speech. 

And — I thought I was obviously going to die. Not because the speech was illegal, it wasn't, but because — the Queen'd had Valia arrested, I knew she was upset about the speech, obviously anyone who upsets the Queen is going to be tortured to death whether or not they've done anything wrong, even if they can say under truthspell that they've never broken a law in their life." Which she can't, obviously. She's not about to confess to arson mid-committee-meeting but if you can't guess that she broke the law under Asmodeus you've got to be pretty stupid. "Or, I mean, I thought Valia might not be, she's a priestess of Iomedae, but if the Queen'd had me tortured to death everyone would just have assumed I'd done something to deserve it, no one cares what happens to random Calistrian priestesses."

"And I also figured — obviously the guards were going to just do whatever they want with me, in the meantime — the person who was asking me questions about what happened told me they weren't allowed to mistreat me, and I thought she had to be very stupid, to believe that. —Uh, she had me Charmed, is why I thought she was stupid and not just lying.

But actually they didn't do any of that? She just... asked me questions, and Charmed me and read my mind, and she talked about having someone cast a Truthtelling but she didn't end up actually doing it. And — one of the first things I said to her was that the Queen was Evil and she should quit her job, and they didn't even have me punished for that. —She isn't Evil, I was just — confused. Anyways. After the questions they let me talk to Valia, and gave me food, and let me write letters, and even once I was all alone by myself none of the guards tried to torture me or force themselves on me or even just rough me up a bit for fun.

And they let me go after, obviously." This is less impressive if you don't know about the arson but it's honestly still pretty impressive.

"...so I actually think, at least in Westcrown, we're doing shockingly well, way better than I'd have expected if you'd asked me beforehand? Like, just about the only thing I think they could've done differently, apart from not arresting me in the first place, is giving me back my holy symbol when they let me out, which is — a really tiny point compared to everything else. And so a lot of what I'm thinking about is — how do we make sure that everyone in the whole country gets treated like that. 

And some of that is rights we already voted on, like the right not to be raped and the right to not have someone threaten you into sleeping with them and and the right not to be tortured during interrogations — although, uh, we might also need to say that guards can't just torture you for fun while they're waiting for your actual punishment, I don't know how you'd write it in the law, just, if they'd waited 'till I got to my cell to torture me that wouldn't have been okay either.

But then I was also thinking it might be good to have — a right for the guards not to beat you up even if they don't actually torture you, and a right not to be punished as if you'd broken the law even if you made the Queen or a noble really mad unless you actually did something wrong, and a right to send letters from prison, and a right to be fed at least once a day unless you're being starved as part of a punishment, and a right to pray as long as it's not to an Evil god or a god from the Lower Planes, and maybe a right to be able to prove with magic that you didn't do anything wrong, except I'm pretty sure we don't have enough wizards for that and I don't want to have to let Evildoers go just because there wasn't a wizard. But if there's wizards around you should use them to check, it seems like that's good to make sure you don't execute innocent people and make sure you don't let Evildoers go free. And obviously you can't just say they can't arrest anyone innocent, since you won't know for sure in advance, but if someone keeps someone way longer than the seven days that we all voted on this morning and they were actually innocent, the person who gave the order should be punished for it. With me they only needed, like, a day. And if they put you on trial, you should have the right to a magistrate who's been ensorcelled to be fair, or who's a paladin, or who's going to be Truthspelled, or something, to make sure that the magistrates don't just ruin the whole thing." There are a bunch of other things that would've made things easier for her but a lot of them would let people get away with it if they'd hurt innocent people, so she's not going to suggest them.

"...also I found out later that when they were asking Valia questions they got her drunk and then made her sign a statement that was — pulling a lot of Asmodean trickery with the words, to make it sound like she did things that she didn't. And Valia can't even read, I don't know if they even told her what she was signing to. So I think we should make a law that if you've arrested someone and you want them to sign to something, and they can't read, you have to read it out exactly to them. And Lluïsa thought maybe there should also be a law about not getting prisoners drunk, and that makes sense to me too, if someone's too drunk to think straight you might think they're innocent when they're actually guilty or guilty when they're actually innocent, but she thought Delegate Bainilus might know more about that."

Jilia writes this down herself, since her scribes went out and it's not worth having her bodyguard do it.

- No torture of prisoners in custody (even outside interrogation)

- All rights of the innocent kept in custody until convicted

- Right to be fed in custody

- Right for prisoners to pray to permitted gods

- Right to prove innocence by spell (if feasible to get detect thoughts/truthtelling) (especially for capital offenses)

- Consequences for long imprisonment of prisoners ultimately not convicted

- Right to a judge guaranteed fair (paladin/geased/required to testify to fairness under truth magic)

- Right not to be befuddled by drink as prisoners

- Right to know the true content of any confession before signing it

"I don't know much more than anyone else about using drink as a tool of interrogation, though I'm sure it offends Cayden and he's close to my heart. I'd want to compare to other countries - Andoran, Molthune, and Lastwall, perhaps Galt. Maybe the other alternatives are worse."

"I think this list covers everything you mentioned, Avenger, and perhaps I should also ask the Queen what code of conduct she has been expecting of the guard here in Westcrown, and make it part of the law. There may be problems with that but if it works for this city that is optimistic it will work, at least, for the other cities and towns."

"Is there anything missing, and do you want to take questions before we bring the scribes back in?"

"Uh, you missed not being beat up by the guards even if it's not torture, and being allowed to send letters. And I think I explained the second one on your list wrong — I was thinking, like, if someone didn't actually do anything wrong, you shouldn't convict them of a crime they didn't do, even if they made a noble really mad.

And, uh, I can take questions if people have questions? ...Does anyone have questions?"

"I'm pretty sure it's already illegal to falsely convict someone, but I can add it."

- Right not to be falsely convicted

- No assault of prisoners in custody (including beatings that might not rise to assault)

- Right for prisoners to send letters

"The chief difficulties with these rights I see," he notes, "are difficulties of implementation. Food is a cost, you need an Abadaran for truly reliable truthtelling and there aren't enough clerics of Abadar for every case, and even an honest judge may have a corrupt jailer. The more we must track, the greater the cost to the Crown, and so ultimately a balance must be struck."

"I also think the right to send letters is difficult. If we arrest a cleric of Norgorber, he may have confederates he wishes to warn. Should we permit him to do so?"

"...No, that does seem like it would be bad."

She is absolutely not going to explain about writing the paladins about arson but it's not like that's the only reason she cares about letters. "One of the things I was worried about when I got arrested was that I'd die and not be able to tell anyone some of the things the azata said and then the laws would be worse. I don't know if writing letters asking the paladins to tell people actually worked but I think it was better than nothing, and most people aren't going to be in that specific scenario but there might be other things they really need to say that are important and not Evil. Like maybe they've got kids who'll be all alone and they need to make sure someone brings them to an orphanage.

And then also if there's no way for prisoners to tell anything to anyone outside there's no way for them to tell anyone about their other rights being violated.

With the first thing you could just say that any letters they write have to be read by someone from the prison first but that wouldn't work for the second thing, I'm not sure if there's a way to fix that."

"Some means of ensuring that rights cannot be invalidated by removing all way to call for them seems important, but I'm not sure letters are the best means."

- Some right or protection that those in custody (or elsewhere?) can make violations of their rights known

goes on her list.

"Actually, hmm, we already discussed right of petition. If there was the right to send letters, and the guards or prosecutors were permitted to read them, unless it was a petition to the Queen or some intermediate lord, that might do."

"What about prisoners who can't write?"

"They gave Valia a secretary, but it might be hard to do that for everyone who can't write if you're somewhere with a lot of them." Victòria is honestly pretty confused about how someone could go to school and not learn how to write but apparently it does happen.