Sovereign citizens are political activists who declare themselves immune from the law. Known as ‘SovCits’, they reject the authority of all government entities, from the police to the courts.
SovCits claim the right to withdraw from all government contracts (meaning laws), refusing to procure licences or other forms of ID, registration plates or to pay taxes and rates.
Nor do they recognise the authority of the courts to hear charges against them.
Sovereign citizens refer to governments as ‘corporations’ as a way of de-legitimising government, denying the jurisdiction and therefore authority of government to make and enforce laws. If government is a corporation, they maintain, SovCits cannot be coerced to abide by laws they have not consented to.
Sovereign citizenship is an example of alt-right politics. It has been around since the 1970s, stemming from anti-Semitic sentiment and anti-tax rhetoric in the United States. The movement gained new followers during the COVID-19 pandemic among those who rejected the lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates. What began as anti-vaccine or anti-mask views became a broader rejection of government.
There is no coherent statement of the precise laws that SovCits do accept or a proposed alternative legal framework, so it’s difficult to determine whether they are motivated by human rights concerns, privacy or disillusionment with government – or what the end game is.
What they have in common is a desire to disrupt the legal framework, which is seen as an oppressive system denying them natural rights.
Flesh, blood and bondage
SovCits often base their arguments in common law. For example, they rely on the old common law distinction between the flesh and blood ‘living person’ on the one hand and legal ‘personhood’ on the other.
No case relying on sovereign citizenship arguments has yet been won in an Australian court.
Australian common law does not make that distinction, not least because it is one that has been used to support slavery. In Australia, every human being once wholly born is a legal person.
SovCits argue that legal personality is a creation of the ‘government corporation’ without their consent, issuing paperwork such as birth certificates as a means of tracking and controlling individuals. They call this legal personality the ‘straw man’ – as opposed to the ‘living person’ who is free and not subject to laws or obligations.
Behind the ‘Bunnings Karen’ mask
Sovereign citizens claim that the only real law is the common law, a body of legal precedent that Australia inherited from the United Kingdom during colonisation and which has continued to develop by Australian courts to form our own common law.
However, that is not the common law SovCits refer to. Their ‘common law’ is ‘pseudo law’, a mixture of real documents and instruments with dubious interpretations and false claims. The ‘Magna Carta’ and ‘Charter of Human Rights’ are part of their lexicon of disruption. The latter, for example, was cited in support of a woman dubbed ‘Bunnings Karen’ when she refused to wear a mask in a Victorian hardware store at the height of the pandemic.
Yet the mask mandate was not a breach of human rights. Rather, what we see is a ‘choose your own adventure’ approach to legal arguments, where international conventions or historical documents are incorrectly and incoherently cited as legal authority for the various claims and views of the movement. The Magna Carta (the 1215 document outlining English political liberties) is a favourite with them. Yet none of the legal sources cited provides the legal authority SovCits think they do.
Do SovCits have a case?
No case relying on sovereign citizenship arguments has yet been won in an Australian court.
Of great interest was case of Western Australia’s Wayne Glew, who refused to pay his local council rates on the basis that local councils are not mentioned in the Australian Constitution and therefore are illegitimate. (Neither is the Prime Minister mentioned in the Constitution). Mr Glew rejected the established principle that state governments can impose taxes and levies alongside the Commonwealth Government. He lost his case and his property was seized to pay the more than $300,000 owed in rates and legal costs.
Are any laws in our society optional?
Laws are not opt-in, nor are they opt-out. There are some laws that do not apply due to life choices. For example, if you choose never to own or drive a car, then all associated laws such as requiring a driver’s licence or paying for compulsory third party (CTP) insurance won’t apply to you. But once you choose to own or drive a car, you are automatically subject to those laws.
No joke: While online videos of sovereign citizens speaking gibberish to police may amuse, Dr Catherine Greentree (pictured) says the movement has been described as a form of domestic terrorism by US intelligence services.
Paying our taxes, acquiring necessary licences and respecting the property rights of others are all laws we are automatically subject to by virtue of living in Australia. At no time can we simply declare we are no longer subject to these laws.
Is this all about avoiding fines?
It is likely that many in the SovCits movement have been driven there by financial stress and frustration. What starts as a search for tips to get out of a speeding fine might bring about a complete shift in ideology and a total rejection of government and the law.
But it is a slippery slope to go from challenging a law or ensuring that government power has been exercised constitutionally to rejecting government outright and claiming to be immune from all laws.
David Heilpern, a former magistrate now Dean of Law at Southern Cross University, recently referred to the sovereign citizen movement as cult-like. And there are elements of that; there is a shared commitment to an anti-government ideology. As a movement, it has attracted marginalised people or those who claim to be special and enlightened. SovCits even have, like cults, their own language and syntax.
Where will it lead?
Most SovCits are non-violent. Indeed, watching videos of people on roadsides trying to persuade police who pull them over that they are not driving, they are ‘travelling’ – while speaking gibberish about the corporate self versus the living human – might seem funny at first. But it is a more insidious kind of radicalism or extremism. These are people whose views are no longer based on reality.
In the United States, the FBI has described the movement as domestic terrorism and a growing number of violent offences around the world have been attributed to those claiming to be sovereign citizens. Arguably, it is not funny anymore. It is potentially a real threat.
Dr Catherine Greentree is a lecturer and researcher at Macquarie Law School. Her specialities are constitutional law, administrative law, criminal law and law reform.
