A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer called supplication.
In the colloquial sense, a petition is a document addressed to an official and signed by numerous individuals. A petition may be oral rather than written, or may be transmitted via the Internet.
A popular initiative, or people's initiative (also citizens' initiative, or civic initiative) is a form of direct democracy by which a petition meeting certain hurdles can force a legal procedure on a proposition.
In direct initiative, the proposition is put directly to a plebiscite or referendum, also called a popular initiated referendum or citizen-initiated referendum.
Naturalization (or naturalisation) is the legal act or process by which a non-national of a country acquires the nationality of that country after birth. The definition of naturalization by the International Organization for Migration of the United Nations excludes citizenship that is automatically acquired (e.g. at birth) or is acquired by declaration. Naturalization usually involves an application or a motion and approval by legal authorities. The rules of naturalization vary from country to country but typically include a promise to obey and uphold that country's laws and taking and subscribing to an oath of allegiance, and may specify other requirements such as a minimum legal residency and adequate knowledge of the national dominant language or culture. To counter multiple citizenship, some countries require that applicants for naturalization renounce any other citizenship that they currently hold, but whether this renunciation actually causes loss of original citizenship, as seen by the host country and by the original country, will depend on the laws of the countries involved. Naturalization is politicized due to the reshaping of the electorate of the country.
Hatt-i humayun (Ottoman Turkish: خط همايون ḫaṭṭ-ı hümayun, plural خط همايونلر, ḫaṭṭ-ı hümayunlar), also known as hatt-i sharif (خط شریف ḫaṭṭ-ı şerîf, plural خط شریفلر, ḫaṭṭ-ı şerîfler), was the diplomatics term for a document or handwritten note of an official nature composed and personally signed by an Ottoman sultan. These notes were commonly written by the sultan personally, although they could also be transcribed by a palace scribe. They were written usually in response to, and directly on, a document submitted to the sultan by the grand vizier or another officer of the Ottoman government. Thus, they could be approvals or denials of a letter of petition, acknowledgements of a report, grants of permission for a request, an annotation to a decree, or other government documents. Hatt-i humayuns could also be composed from scratch, rather than as a response to an existing document.
After the Tanzimat era (1839–1876), aimed at modernizing the Ottoman Empire, hatt-i humayuns of the routine kind, as well as fermans, were supplanted by the practice of irade-i seniyye, or irade (Ottoman Turkish: اراده سنیه irâde-i seniyye; French: iradé or less standardly iradèh, meaning 'ordinance'), in which the sultan's spoken response to his Grand Vizier's recommendations was recorded on the document by his scribe.
Memorialization is the process of preserving memories, especially the collective memory, of people or events. It can be a form of a memorial, and address or petition, or a ceremony of remembrance or commemoration.
Procedural records are the set of constituent parts of a judicial process or administrative process, such as the petitions, terms of hearing, certificates, among others. Traditionally, they have always been in physical format, but with the advent of the electronic process, they have gradually been replaced by records in electronic format.
The physical records are made up of a jumble of papers, which are held together by staples, plastic tracks, or brackets ("ballerinas" for holding paper), and which usually have a cover. In these volumes of papers, the acts of each process are recorded. The records are worked on by civil servants, usually from the judiciary, but also from other branches of government, in the case of administrative proceedings. The parties, or their lawyers, have access to view them, and sometimes, the latter can remove them from the custody of the state for a certain period of time, committing to return them intact. Every procedural act, even in physical processes, is usually registered in an electronic system, for better monitoring. Eventually, if the physical records are lost, they can be reconstituted by means of copies of the fundamental documents.