Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN on February 01, 2021, 04:07:59 PMQuoteGenerally speaking, the Covenants are understood as a list of rights that citizens enjoy and upon which the Government cannot infringe.
No, that's just how you understand them, presumably on the analogy of the US Bill of Rights. But the Preamble states that "The Covenant of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in them to all Talossan citizens". It positively grants rights rather than negatively prevents infringements upon them.
The U.S. Bill of Rights was explicitly the model for the Covenants, and a great deal of the language is identical, and the Covenants have been generally understood as a guarantee against action against your rights. This is clear when we look at the Tenth Covenant, which says that "[a]nyone whose rights and freedoms, as guaranteed by these Covenants, have been infringed or denied may appeal to a court of competent jurisdiction to obtain such redress of grievances as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances." Neither here nor anywhere else are there provisions for the criminalization of such infringements. If the Ziu passes a law restricting someone's religious liberty, then no one can prosecute the people who voted in favor in the Ziu imprisoned for their "crime" of passing a law that violated the Covenants, for example.