Constitutional Sovereignty Doctrine: A Control-Based Architecture for Trustworthy AI, Data Sovereignty, and Accountable Digital Decision Systems

Abstract

This research develops Constitutional Sovereignty Doctrine, or CSD, as a socio technical governance framework for assessing whether a public institution retains sufficient lawful, operational, computational, evidentiary, and remedial control over an AI-enabled decision system for which it remains legally and constitutionally accountable. The doctrine extends beyond territorial data residency and infrastructure ownership by examining control across the decision chain, including lawful authority, data, infrastructure, models and inference, human judgement, evidentiary traceability, rights and review, and corrective capacity. The paper also introduces Accountability-Control Asymmetry (ACA), a diagnostic concept describing situations in which formal responsibility remains with a public institution while the practical capabilities required to supervise, explain, reconstruct, intervene in, or remedy a decision are distributed elsewhere. CSD is grounded in Constitutional Intelligence, Canadian administrative law,
contemporary digital-sovereignty policy, research on meaningful human oversight and procedural fairness, and international AI-governance standards. The eight dimensions are expressed through a functional model, CSD = f(A, D, I, M, J, E, R, C), and are treated as assessable institutional capabilities rather than as a predetermined numerical index. The research design therefore emphasises construct validity, expert assessment, architecture-based experiments, inter-rater reliability, and comparison with simpler sovereignty proxies such as data residency and infrastructure ownership.