The Pseudo-Legal Language of ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Court Cases in Aotearoa and Australia

And the final paper in this ANZCA 2023 session is by Petra Theunissen, whose focus is on the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ movement in Aotearoa and Australia. This is a non-prosocial activist movement, which believes in the illegitimacy of government institutions and sees itself as subject to laws only as they interpret and consent to them. This morphed from a far-right, white supremacist posse comitatus into a broader movement that now overlaps (but is not the same as) other movements including anti-vaxxers, conspiracists, and other groups.

The key beliefs of this movement are that governments are corrupt and extract taxes illegally, in violation of natural rights; therefore, they believe themselves to be unbound by statute law unless they agree to such law. This is also imbued by conspiracy theories, the reinterpretation of constitutions in light of alternative histories, and building on pseudo-law arguments that, for instance, incorrectly equate laws with contracts that both sides need to agree to.

Law enforcement increasingly sees these groups as extremists and as potentially violent, but these groups also engage in what has been called ‘paper terrorism’: a form of symbolic violence enacted through frivolous and vexatious lawsuits that overburden the courts and thereby prevent courts from dealing with more important matters. Such groups do so in the belief that they are acting in self-defence against corrupt governments, and will be vindicated once these governments are overturned. Australia has a long history of such groups, including in the form of tax-evading ‘micronations’ with self-declared kings and princes.

Such paper terrorism should be distinguished from more prosocial activism, even though some such activists (e.g. those agitating for greater action on climate change) are also increasingly criminalised and even described as terrorists. Paper terrorism is different in its vexatiousness (yet not all vexatious litigants are ‘Sovereign Citizens’), however. This study took a socio-legal approach to studying this paper terrorism by examining some 49 court cases in Aotearoa and Australia that involved ‘Sovereign Citizens’, which often ran to many pages of court records; in Australia, many such cases came from the state of New South Wales, interestingly. The volume of cases increased substantially with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most of the ‘Sovereign Citizens’ involved in these cases represented themselves, in spite of their lack of legal training; judges repeatedly (but unsuccessfully) tried to encourage them to seek professional legal representation, not least also because they did not recognise the authority of the court itself. They often made arguments that sought to distinguish between their ‘flesh and blood’ identity and their abstract legal identity as created by their birth certificate, the former of which should not be considered subject to the law.

Defendants also filed various spurious affidavits to this end, stating their immunity from the law and relying on legalistic language that refers to legal instruments that do not exist under Australian or Aotearoa systems of justice; these were generally dismissed out of hand by courts, but take up considerable time for courts to process. Some such documents borrow from legal terms elsewhere in the world; in Australia, they sometimes also threaten police or courts with (violent) consequences for continuing to enforce the laws.

Common arguments here include raising issues of sovereignty and jurisdiction, strawman arguments, a breach of rights, incorrect references to native title rights and Māori law (this is largely typical for Aotearoa rather than Australia), spurious affidavits, and other pseudo-legal strategies; these generally have no genuine legal basis and are universally dismissed by the courts. A strong mistrust of authority pervades such arguments. Further research into the rhetoric used here would be useful – and ‘Sovereign Citizen’ language now also appears in court cases well beyond the smaller group of people who genuinely identify as ‘Sovereign Citizens’.