Over the last year, representatives of the United States government and American technology companies have repeatedly traveled to Brussels and Strasbourg in the hopes of containing an effort by the European Commission to strengthen data protection rules for citizens of the European Union.
However, other EU governments have said they will not countenance any changes to freedom-of-movement rules, enabling citizens of EU countries to live and work in other nations.
The concept was enthusiastically taken up by the government of Honduras several years ago but Romer dropped out of the project after his idea of a transparent and independent city became corrupted by political and business interests and it became evident that the city might not adhere to the cardinal rule of ensuring citizens' free mobility in, and out, of the zone.
Democracies must also expand the rule of law, citizens' access to the justice system, state guarantees of civil and political rights, and protections for political minorities.
He also flags up the European Union's incoming GDPR General Data Protection Regulationn), which ramps up penalties for violations of rules on processing citizens' personal data, as another instance of data-centric laws creating data processing pain-points that NuCypher's platform is setting out to fix.
Afroyim v. Rusk,, is a major United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily.
Last year a court in the Dominican Republic ruled that citizens of Haitian descent born since the country's constitution was written in 1929 should have their citizenship status reviewed and "corrected", making more than 200,000 people stateless and excluding them from schools, health care and formal jobs.
Trying to keep things in check, European officials issued 16 pages of proposed rules for the citizens' initiative, translating the vague language of the Lisbon treaty into a thicket of regulations, which critics say could strangle the experiment at birth.
An independent judicial panel of citizens ruled last July that the men should go on trial, after public prosecutors had twice decided not to pursue the case.
"A constitutional rule requiring equal numbers of citizens would necessitate a different kind of census than the one currently conducted," Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Columbia, wrote in 2011 in the Cardozo Law Review.
"We — and a wide range of human rights and media organizations, and others, like Wikimedia — believe that this runs contrary to the basic principles of international law: No one country should be able to impose its rules on the citizens of another country, especially when it comes to linking to lawful content," wrote Google's Kent Walker, in 2015.
