Hi! Spurred by a joke i saw on Twitter suggesting that the UK Parliament meet in New York, i got to thinking, have any legislatures or governments anywhere held official sessions outside of their jurisdictions? I don’t think a government-in-exile, from wartime or revolutionaries or so on, should count. (Wikipedia has a large list of those at Government in exile - Wikipedia )
The session should:
be widely recognized as the “real” government of country (or county, province, village, etc) A
and they do some official business that impacts law or administration inside territory A
and it’s a large portion of the government body, at least a quorum
and it’s only country A, so international bodies like the EU or negotiations like the Yalta conference can’t squeak in here
but they just happen to be meeting in country B for expediency or for funsies.
I’m guessing that the cases that are most likely are city councils which happen to meet in a venue outside their city limits when the usual venue is temporarily booked, but it would be fun to read about the time that, say, Pottsylvania shipped its Senate across the border on a goodwill tour of Arstotzka and they happened to pass some bills there. My other guesses for likely candidates are socialist bloc states which have more invested, ideologically, in internationalist ideals, and states or provinces in systems like the US where occasionally minority-party legislators can leave state borders to help quorum-busting attempts.
The legislature of North Gyeongsan Province, South Korea used to meet in Daegu even after Daegu was no longer part of the province as of 1981. The capital of the province was moved from Daegu to Andong in 2016.
The Province of Rizal, the Philippines had Pasig as its capital. When the National Capital Region (Metro Manila) was organized in 1975, it took away about half the province including the capital city. Yet Pasig remained the capital of Rizal until 2009 when the provincial government was physically moved to Antipolo. Officially, Pasig was still the capital until just last month (June 2020), when legislation was finally enacted to designate Antipolo as the capital of Rizal.
Until 1965 the official capital of Bechuanaland Protectorate - a British colony which later gained independence as Botswana - was at Mafikeng, 25 kilometres across the border inside South Africa. The Protectorate didn’t have a legislature (except for the last few years before independence) but it had two Advisory Councils (one for “Africans” and one for “Europeans”) which had their sessions at Mafikeng until some point in the 1950s. Source.
During the division of Germany, the West German federal assembly (a kind of electoral college convened solely for the purpose of electing the President) had a tradition of meeting in West Berlin. At the time, the precise poitical status of West Berlin was disputed: De facto it was a state of West Germany and exclave within East Germany, and that was also the de jure situation according to the West German position. According to the East German and Soviet position, West Berlin was, in line with the post-war occupation status, a separate political entity. The Soviets made a point of trying to disturb these meetings by having supersonic flights above Berlin at that time.