Part I — Who counts, and what they are owed

2. Who Counts

Nell enters the record through a birth. Someone without a birth record can enter through an encounter. The routes differ; the personhood they establish does not.

The ways in

Personhood follows from a recorded birth, first contact, presence within the republic's jurisdiction or effective control. Each route is independent. None requires another to happen first, and none requires citizenship, identity papers or a family.

Presence reaches someone within the jurisdiction without asking whether that person was granted permission to be there. Effective control reaches someone under the republic's power without making protection depend on the location. Moving a person across a border does not remove this ground of obligation.

Each route leads to the same floor. The chapter's cases supply a birth for one person, first contact for another, presence for another and effective control for another. Food is owed in each case. The entitlement and protections attach to the resulting personhood, without a further test of how it was reached.

A name at an encounter is a handle

An encounter needs a way to refer to the person. Its temporary name can serve that purpose without establishing a civil identity. It proves no citizenship, family relationship, liability or guilt. Assistance need not wait for a match against another record.

A claimed alias does not merge identities. The test records a claimed link between encounter names and asks whether either becomes the other. Neither does. The claim therefore imports no conviction, sentence or history through an assumed match. Consequential identity links remain separate, challengeable claims.

The entry rules also distinguish people from public bodies. A first-contact entry naming the Court does not give the Court personhood. The institutional name is already marked as a public body and is excluded by the entry rule. An office cannot acquire human standing merely by recording an encounter.

What cannot take it away

A broken status record does not erase a valid standing root. In the test, a registry entry concerning a person is marked as broken. The entry remains visible, and the person's first-contact root still establishes personhood. A defect in that record does not undo the encounter.

Missing or disputed age evidence also leaves standing intact. The executable ballot route needs adulthood evidence; the floor does not. Nor do missing capacity evidence or refusal of support postpone personhood. These are separate questions.

Correction must retain the provenance needed for accountability and remedy. It does not turn uncertainty into permission to combine people's histories or to withhold what the unreconciled person is owed.

Standing without a roster

Standing does not depend on a maintained roster. A supplied birth or encounter is enough, including an encounter held under a temporary name. Missing identity papers do not create a waiting period for the floor, process or remedy.

The custody and release rules remain valid independent routes. A person whose encounter was not recorded must not lose standing because the record begins with confinement. Protective-order and independently witnessed physical-holding routes provide further backstops. The prisoner chapter tests what happens when only the conviction route is present.

These routes do not observe anyone. They establish a legal consequence from supplied evidence. A custody conclusion can establish personhood without proving that the holding was entered accurately, just as an encounter entry can do so without authenticating the name attached to it.

The child with nobody

Nell needs no special class of standing. The birth entry reaches the same personhood and floor as the encounter cases in this chapter. A family, document or adulthood finding is absent from Nell's record and unnecessary to those conclusions.

What none of this observes

No rule here discovers someone who has never been entered. Birth and encounter must reach the record before their consequences can follow. The independent advocate's duty to begin assistance does not make that first observation happen.

The next chapter asks what else may enter this limited record about the person.