Wookieepedia:Featured article queue/January 10, 2011

The Convention of Civilized Systems was a bill of rights movement that had been ratified by the Galactic Republic by the time of the Clone Wars. It was put into effect to apply better methods of determining a species' sentience, and it additionally granted the rights of sentient Republic citizens to those who were deemed to deserve them. The decree provided various tests to ascertain sentience, and amendments to the act expanded its coverage to species in multiple star systems that appeared incapable of interstellar travel. However, the bill of rights itself increased genocidal crimes against previously undocumented sentient species, as some individuals drove species to extinction and then covered up the massacres so as not to be prosecuted by the Republic. Besides these illicit genocides, another example of a failure of the law act's enforcement occurred when Chairman Chi Cho of the Pantoran Assembly declared war on the Talz tribe that had colonized the ice world Orto Plutonia, intent on discrediting their claim to Orto Plutonia and restoring that of the planet's moon, Pantora. The fiasco ended when Senator Riyo Chuchi negotiated a peace agreement with the Talz, who were in fact sentient despite Cho's claims that they were not covered by the Convention of Civilized Systems.