National Disestablishment

National Disestablishment is the most severe judgement which can be rendered upon a nation by the Stellar Compact in the current international order. Effectively a pronouncement that a state is no longer fit to exist, this sentence forces its dissolution, and in some cases even the relocation of its population.

Disestablishment in Stellar Compact law is reserved for only the absolute worst offenders against civilization and international peace—nations which use weapons of mass destruction on civilian targets at planetwide scales, or adopt violent genocide as official policy, or become such a persistent factor in stirring up conflicts that they ought to be dissolved and reformed under new management, or other such grievous, continued offenses.

It is proceeded to only after numerous warnings to the state in question, and obliges it to cease all but necessary civic functions while it is shut down and reconstituted into something else. Most nations which face disestablishment have a new government formed over their old territory, though often with changes in borders if ethnic strife a the chief cause. Others, however, are considered so bad that their ideology and base of supporters must be scattered away and never permitted to reform—this would be a state in the vein of the Nazi Reich on ancient Terra. Government officials, employees, and military personnel in these cases will be investigated for war crimes and sapient rights violations, and referred to trial if probable cause found, while supporters not considered criminally culpable in the regime's atrocities, but nonetheless unwilling to reform, will be required to leave and relocate to another nation, to ensure the dissolved state cannot reconstitute.

Theoretically, if an entire nation were judged utterly incorrigible, its complete population could be moved and someone else resettled in its former territory, but in all cases so far, there have thankfully been reasonable voices willing to take control after the state-level criminals are cleared out.

National disestablishment is undertaken despite its expense due to fears that such extreme offenders would, besides continuing to perpetrate grievous sapient rights violations, risk spreading their violence to other nations in Starweb space, causing an existential threat to its society.

It has never been applied to a major member state, most recipients of disestablishment are protectorates involved in long-running, brutal wars.