Legal Basis

This text presents the legal basis for the principles and mechanisms set out in the Earthlings Declaration. The Declaration states values and aims; this document examines whether the scheme is legally permissible and how it might be classified in international law.

Where this document and the Declaration diverge, the Declaration prevails.

Addressed to: lawyers, analysts, scholars of international law, representatives of international organizations, and sceptical readers for whom consistent argument matters.

The four propositions come first so that the reader can see from the outset what exactly is being asserted and what is not.

First. The norms we rely on are in force today: freedom of association (Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 11 of the European Convention) and the right of peoples to self-determination (common Article 1 of the 1966 Covenants; as a principle it is enshrined in the UN Charter, Article 1(2)). The 1966 Covenants and the European Convention are binding on the states parties to them; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by General Assembly resolution A/RES/217(III)A and has no binding force of its own, but its provisions have passed into treaties and into the practice of states. None of these norms has been invented or proposed "for the future".

Second. No binding norm contains a requirement of territory as a condition of a people's existence. Not the UN Charter, not common Article 1 of the Covenants, not a single convention. What is more, no definition of a people exists at all, and this has been recorded in an official document of the United Nations.

Third. The whole body of practice rejecting the claims of groups on the merits concerns secession - the Aaland Islands, Badinter, Katanga, Cameroon. The Earthlings people seeks no secession, changes no borders, and claims no territory. The precedents strike at a claim we do not make and are silent on the one we do.

Fourth. It does not follow from this that the question is settled in our favour. It follows that it is not settled: international law has not determined how existing norms apply to a voluntarily founded non-territorial people. Such questions have always been resolved the same way - by the accumulation of verifiable practice. We therefore propose that what should be assessed is not the force of a self-designation but the practice - and we submit that practice for examination.

The document is called a legal basis, and its sources are chosen accordingly.

We rely on binding norms (the UN Charter, the Covenants, conventions, General Assembly resolutions to the extent that they reflect the agreement of states), on decisions of bodies that apply the law (the International Court of Justice, UN treaty bodies, regional courts and commissions, national courts), and on verifiable facts (treaties concluded, acts adopted, claims that succeeded and claims that did not).

We do not rely on doctrinal opinion and we do not argue with it. Article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice treats the teachings of publicists as a subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law, not as a source of them. A specialist's opinion creates no norm, abolishes no norm, and binds no one; scholarly opinion on the question before us is unsettled and includes mutually exclusive positions.

Two consequences follow. We do not cite doctrinal formulations as obstacles: the assertion that a people must be connected to a territory appears often in the literature, but is contained in no binding norm, and giving it the force of a norm would be to mistake what is desirable for what is in force. And we do not cite them as support: there are positions in the literature that favour us, but what does not bind an opponent should not count for us either.

None of this makes the objections go away. Every serious objection is set out below in its strongest form - as a legal proposition to be tested against a norm. Where we have no answer, we say so plainly.

Disputes about legal personality constantly confuse three different questions, and half the objections arise from that conflation.

Whether the community exists - a question of fact. Either a community of people has formed or it has not, and no one's consent is required here.

Whether its emergence is lawful - a question of the norms in force, and it is settled by freedom of association.

Whether it possesses international legal personality - a recognized capacity to bear rights and obligations in its own name at the international level. It is built up only through the acts of states and international bodies.

The third is the contested one, and on it our position is the classical one: recognition is the destination, not the entry ticket.

The Earthlings people does not abolish the state, does not duplicate the functions of public authority, and does not require anyone to renounce their citizenship. It lays no claim to territory, to taxation of populations, to criminal jurisdiction, or to a monopoly on force. Belonging does not affect citizenship, tax obligations, or jurisdiction, and where applicable laws conflict, the mandatory norms of the relevant national jurisdiction prevail.

This provision runs through the whole document.

The Earthlings people does not claim to represent humanity. It concerns only those who freely accede to the Declaration, have their uniqueness confirmed, and knowingly take on an additional belonging. Until the founding period ends there are no such individuals at all, and no one can speak on behalf of the Earthlings people today.

The aim of the initiative is not to usurp the voice of humanity, but to create a legal mechanism capable of showing how the transnational will of individuals might find institutional expression.

Here precision matters more than making a favourable impression.

A people defined by an adopted text does not yet exist. The Declaration exists in an initial edition and is not yet a founding act. Signing the Declaration and entering the people are suspended for the duration of the founding period. The infrastructure, however, has been built and is working - identity verification, the passport, the registry, voting, the public treasury; there is no tool for secret voting yet, and the founding vote will be held openly, and the Treasury smart contracts have not been deployed (the document "Where We Are Now"). What is chiefly lacking is an adopted founding text.

The order of founding has been established and published in advance:

• 22 November 2026 - submissions open for proposals on the whole corpus: the Declaration, the Charter, the other twenty-three documents, including this one, and the three annexes to the document Civic Voice. Any person may submit a proposal; entry, identity verification, and agreement with our conclusions are not required for it, and anonymous proposals are considered on the same footing as the rest.
• 20 February 2027 - submissions close.
• 13 March 2027 - the full record of proposals and replies is published, including rejected proposals, each with the reason for its rejection; the final editions in Russian and English are published.
• 3 April 2027 - the Declaration is adopted by a vote of confirmed participants on the principle of "one person, one vote": no fewer than two thirds of the votes cast, with no fewer than one hundred confirmed participants and no fewer than thirty per cent of the total number of confirmed participants taking part.

Until the day of adoption, a person who has confirmed their identity is a participant in the founding, not an earthling. Confirmation is free, does not constitute entry, and confers a temporary status carrying the right to vote on the day of adoption.

This has two consequences for this document.

The first counts against us: wherever the features described below depend on numbers, on who makes up the people, and on accumulated practice, what is meant is the scheme and its designed capacity, not a state of affairs already achieved. There is not yet a single earthling, there is no practice, and no founding act has been adopted.

The second is material to the legal assessment. Ordinarily the founding text of a community is written before the community appears, and joining amounts to agreeing to a finished document. Here the order is reversed: the text is put to a vote of people each of whom is confirmed as one living human being; proposals are accepted from anyone and published together with the replies. The collective will is thereby neither presumed nor reconstructed - it is produced by a procedure and is preserved in a verifiable record.

The right of peoples to self-determination is enshrined in the foundations of the international order. Article 1(2) of the UN Charter names the development of friendly relations among nations as a purpose of the Organization "based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples". Common Article 1(1) of both 1966 Covenants provides: "All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development."

This is one of the few provisions recognized as an obligation owed to all: its erga omnes character was confirmed by the International Court of Justice in the East Timor case (Portugal v. Australia, judgment of 30 June 1995, I.C.J. Reports 1995, p. 90, paragraph 29) and reaffirmed in the advisory opinions on the Wall (2004) and on the Chagos Archipelago (2019).

None of these texts defines what a people is. Nor does any other treaty.

This is not the observation of an interested party. A study prepared at the request of the UN Sub-Commission and published as an official document (E/CN.4/Sub.2/404/Rev.1, 1981) puts the position as follows:

And on why no definition emerged: "[B]ecause no definition has been formulated, the United Nations has proceeded with caution in cases of political self-determination, although it has acted firmly in the matter of the elimination of colonialism... It would therefore be premature and even presumptuous to try to lay down here and now a definition which could be used in all parts of the world and which would cover all situations" (paragraph 279). The same paragraph continues that the elements of a definition which have emerged from discussions on this subject in the United Nations "cannot and should not be ignored", and the second of them is that a people "implies a relationship with a territory, even if the people in question has been wrongfully expelled from it and artificially replaced by another population".

The absence of a definition is not the category's only gap.

Who makes up a people. No treaty determines who makes up a people or how that is to be established. There is no register of peoples. There is no body that recognizes peoples. There is no registration procedure, and no people in history has ever gone through one. Few have a document of belonging to a people, and it is issued within a framework established by a state (Section 04); a French, Japanese or Kurdish person has no such document.

A procedure for expressing will. Nowhere is it stated by what act the will of individuals becomes the will of a people. There is no set procedure, no threshold, and no way to verify the result. The referendums of the decolonization period were organized by states and international bodies, that is, by bodies external to the people itself.

A forum. Article 34(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice provides: "Only states may be parties in cases before the Court." A people cannot appear as a party.

It was not through negligence that the indeterminacy persisted. Defining a people meant giving a right to groups inside existing states, and the traces of that decision are recorded in the documents themselves: the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (resolution 1514 (XV) of 14 December 1960), after proclaiming the right of peoples to self-determination in paragraph 2, immediately stipulated in paragraph 6 that "any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations". The right was made broad in wording and narrow in application.

The practical consequence of these gaps is this. Those peoples that already have a state of their own can exercise the right of peoples to self-determination by their own means: the state knows who its citizens are, has a voting procedure, and is admitted to international bodies - it supplies all three missing elements on its own. A people without a state cannot by itself establish who makes it up, express a will, or take that will to a place where it must be reckoned with as the will of a people. Those who have the right de facto hardly need it; those who need it cannot exercise it by their own means.

Good faith requires that we ourselves point out where in General Assembly resolutions territory is tied to a people.

General Assembly resolution 1541 (XV) of 15 December 1960 establishes in Principle IV that the obligation to transmit information exists prima facie in respect of a territory "which is geographically separate and is distinct ethnically and/or culturally from the country administering it".

Resolution 2625 (XXV) of 24 October 1970, in its safeguard clause, speaks of states "possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction as to race, creed or colour". The Russian text is weaker here: "the whole people residing in that territory". Both texts are official, and we cite both rather than the one that suits us.

Here is what follows from this, and what does not.

Neither resolution contains a definition of a people. Resolution 1541 classifies a territory, not a group: its subject is the question of when an administering state is obliged to report. Resolution 2625 describes the conditions under which the territorial integrity of a state is protected. Neither answers the question "who is a people" and neither was asked that question. Resolution 1541 concerns decolonization, while resolution 2625 sets out principles of international law addressed to all states; the drafters of neither were confronted with the class of situations in which a community arises by the voluntary decision of individuals and claims no territory.

But a textual link does exist, and it would be inaccurate to assert that territory figures in this question only in the opinions of specialists.

The conclusion: no binding norm contains a requirement of territory as a condition of a people's existence. This does not prove that a non-territorial people is known to the law. It proves that the norms do not prohibit one.

There are written norms in force in which self-identification is expressly made the basis of a status.

ILO Convention No. 169 (adopted 27 June 1989, in force 5 September 1991), Article 1(2): "Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply."

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (resolution 61/295 of 13 September 2007), Article 33(1): indigenous peoples have the right "to determine their own identity or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions".

The question "is this group a people" is not an abstract question with no one to resolve it. It is resolved by bodies applying the law when a group brings a specific claim - and it is resolved on the basis of criteria.

The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in the Endorois case (communication 276/2003, decision adopted in November 2009): "The African Commission is satisfied that the Endorois are a 'people', a status that entitles them to benefit from provisions of the African Charter that protect collective rights" (paragraph 162). The Commission relied on the criteria for identifying indigenous peoples set out by the Commission's Working Group of Experts (paragraph 150): occupation and use of a specific territory; the voluntary perpetuation of cultural distinctiveness; self-identification as a distinct collectivity and recognition by other groups; an experience of subjugation, marginalization, dispossession, exclusion, or discrimination. It lists the features of a people separately (paragraph 151).

The African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights in the Ogiek case (application 006/2012, judgment of 26 May 2017) proceeded differently, and the difference should be stated precisely: the Court recognized the Ogiek as an indigenous population (paragraph 112) rather than declaring them a people in the same declaratory form, and only then applied Articles 21 and 22 of the African Charter to them, noting that peoples' rights may be recognized "where necessary, specifically for the ethnic groups and communities that constitute the population of a State" (paragraph 199), provided that they do not call into question the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the State without its consent, and with the exception of the right to self-determination and independence under Article 20(1), which is not automatically recognized for them.

The right of peoples to self-determination is binding and recognized erga omnes. The bearer of that right is not defined, and the absence of a definition is officially recorded. Binding norms contain no requirement of territory; where territory appears in the texts, it answers a different question. Self-identification is known to the law as a ground of belonging, though within narrow limits. Peoplehood is established on the basis of criteria when a specific claim arises.

None of these elements proves that Earthlings is a people. Together they establish something else: the question is open, and it is open not because we say so, but because the law has not closed it.

Correcting international law is the business of states. The Earthlings people does something else: it demonstrates in its own case what the category never had. Everything listed here is a property of the scheme as built; giving these properties substance begins with the adoption of the founding text.

Who makes up the people. It is known: behind every participant stands one living human being, and this is confirmed. Not by census, not by custom, and not by someone else's law, but verifiably and at any time.

Procedure. There is a way in which a will becomes a common will: a vote on the principle of one person, one vote, in which a vote cannot be bought, accumulated, or irrevocably transferred. The first application of this procedure will be the vote on the adoption of the founding text itself.

Record. Any person can verify who makes up the people and the results of votes, without having to trust the operator of the infrastructure.

And all of this without any claim to territory. The conflict that makes the law cautious about the emergence of new peoples does not arise here: one cannot encroach on what one does not claim.

This does not prove that Earthlings is a people within the meaning of common Article 1 of the Covenants. It proves something else: the three missing elements are supplied in practice, which was not always possible, because the means did not exist.

In practice, citizenship has taken the place of the missing answer to the question of who makes up a people. "The people of France" in fact means "the citizens of France": that is how constitutions are structured, how statistics count, and how courts reason.

The substitution breaks down in four directions at once. One people, several citizenships: the Kurds live in four states, everyone calls them a people, yet they cannot express a common will. One citizenship, several communities: the Constitution of Russia speaks expressly of a multinational people. A people without citizenship: the Rohingya were deprived of Myanmar citizenship by the Burma Citizenship Law of 1982 (Pyithu Hluttaw Law No. 4 of 1982, promulgated 15 October 1982), which based citizenship on belonging to "national races" settled in the country before 1823 (section 3); they did not cease to be a people, but in the legal system no one speaks for them. One person, two citizenships: by the logic of the substitution they belong to two peoples at once, which is meaningless within that logic.

Four breaks in different directions mean that citizenship is not a criterion but a habit of those who apply the law. Hence the circularity: constitutions call the people the source of authority, while citizenship law, that is, the state itself, determines who makes up the people. The founder is defined by the founded.

The consequences are concrete. A people divided by borders has the right but lacks the means to exercise it. A people deprived of citizenship remains a people yet ceases to be anyone at all in the eyes of the legal system. Peoples inside states speak in international forums through the voice of the very state with which they are most often in dispute. On planetary questions - climate, the environment, future generations - the law has recognized interests that have no bearer.

Documents of belonging to a people do exist, and how they are kept should be described precisely.

United States. Federally recognized tribes determine their own membership and issue membership cards. A tribe's right to set membership criteria was confirmed by the US Supreme Court in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 (1978). Photo identification issued by federally recognized tribes, including the Enhanced Tribal Card, is accepted by the US Transportation Security Administration as proof of identity.

Northern Europe. Sami electoral rolls are kept by Sami parliaments established by national statutes: Norway - the Sami Act of 12 June 1987, Sweden - the Sametingslag (SFS 1992:1433), Finland - the Act on the Sami Parliament (974/1995). The ground of entry combines a subjective and an objective criterion: under section 3 of the Finnish Act (as amended by Act 414/2025, in force since 1 August 2025), a person has the right to be entered on the roll if they consider themselves Sami and also meet one of the objective conditions: that Sami was the first language of that person or of one of their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents; or that one of their parents has been entered on the roll for elections to the Sami Parliament held on or after 1 January 2027.

New Zealand. The Maori roll is kept not by the people but by the state - by the Electoral Commission under the Electoral Act 1993. The condition is descent (section 3), but the choice between the general roll and the Maori roll rests with the person, and descent is declared without proof.

The assertion "for the first time in history a document of belonging to a people is being issued" would be untrue, and it must not be made. It would equally be untrue to claim that a person's will plays no part in these rolls. The difference lies elsewhere: there, a person's will operates inside a circle drawn by descent, and does not itself draw the circle.

We qualify the last row ourselves: the legal grounds for burning a passport against the holder's will come down to one - annulment of an invalid issuance in the cases exhaustively listed in Article 8 of the Declaration, with notice, a period for objection, and appeal - but in the deployed version of the contract the technical ability to burn a passport remains with the holder of the owner keys. The restriction in Article 21 of the Earthlings Charter is procedural, not technical; until the Declaration is adopted, there is no Independent Council and no Assembly (Charter, Article 38), and against the holder's will, the temporary document of a participant in the founding is burned under the procedure set out in the document "The Founding Period" (Part 2, section 5). Separating the rights of issuance and burning has been added to the roadmap.

Stated precisely: documents of belonging to a people exist, but all of them certify a belonging derived from descent and recognized by a state. For the first time, belonging will be certified by a document issued by the people itself, tied neither to territory nor to descent, arising from the decision of the person themselves, and verifiable by anyone.

The assertion "issued by the people" does not rest on words alone: Article 9 of the Declaration establishes that the registry of earthlings and the confirmation of their identity "are not the property of any legal entity and cannot be transferred, sold, pledged or otherwise disposed of", and that legal entities "do not embody the people". Without that norm, the assertion would amount to saying that the document was issued by a commercial company.

The earthling passport does not replace state documents, and confers no citizenship, visas, right of entry, or consular protection. It certifies belonging to a people, a belonging that arose from the decision of the person themselves - which state documents do not certify at all.

No association does without a decision on admission: states naturalize at their discretion, associations decide by resolution of a board, and even in the rolls kept by indigenous peoples themselves the decision is taken by their own body.

In the Earthlings people, there is no such thing as a decision on admission. There are four conditions, and they are self-executing: they are checked by a procedure against facts, not by a body at its discretion. Together with the prohibition of expulsion this yields a position found nowhere else: the people has no power over belonging either at entry or at exit; only the person themselves has control over it.

The objection here is obvious: the recognized formula holds that a people determines its own membership, whereas here anyone who wishes determines it unilaterally. The answer: the question is settled once, at the level of a rule set out in the Declaration - belonging attaches to everyone who meets the four conditions and has decided to belong; with the adoption of the Declaration this rule will become a decision of the people. Collective self-determination is exercised at the level of the rule rather than of individual cases; deciding each case on a discretionary basis is neither the only way nor the safer one, since where there is discretion there is also arbitrariness.

We ourselves point out three qualifications. The annulment of a passport issuance obtained unlawfully takes place irrespective of the person's will but does not end belonging - this is not a measure of liability but a finding that the issuance never lawfully took place. Identity verification may fail; a refusal is not final, and there is no limit on the number of attempts. And verification rests on an identity document: a person without documents cannot enter today - this restriction contradicts Article 8 of the Declaration and is among the open questions.

Here freedom of exit contrasts sharply with citizenship. The right to change one's nationality is recognized (Article 15(2) of the Universal Declaration), the freedom to leave any country is protected by Article 12(2) of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but exit is conditional: Article 7(1)(a) of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness provides that renunciation "shall not result in loss of nationality unless the person concerned possesses or acquires another nationality", and Article 8(1) prohibits deprivation of nationality that would render a person stateless. Hence the position: citizenship is the only legal bond of an adult from which one cannot withdraw unilaterally. This is not a prohibition on leaving but the absence of anywhere to go: the planet is divided up with nothing left over, and no status of being "outside" is provided for.

The restriction arose as a protection: the experience of the 1930s showed that a person deprived of nationality formally retains human rights but has no one obliged to secure them; hence the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which defined a stateless person as one "who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law" (Article 1(1)). The price of that protection is that an adult cannot control their own belonging.

In the Earthlings people, exit is free, unilateral, and requires no one's consent. The qualification we make ourselves: exit costs nothing today precisely because belonging offers little. The more the people offers, the more costly exit will become, and only then will this guarantee be truly tested.

The term "natural person" arose not to replace the human being but out of the need to describe bearers of rights that are not human. Logically it is not required: the German Civil Code opens with a norm about the human being - "Die Rechtsfähigkeit des Menschen beginnt mit der Vollendung der Geburt", the legal capacity of a human being begins on the completion of birth (section 1). The law acknowledges as much itself: "everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law" (Article 6 of the Universal Declaration, and in identical terms Article 16 of the Covenant).

The capacity to be a person has been taken away, and taken away by law: slavery, civil death, deprivation of nationality in the 1930s. The reverse movement is under way today: legal personality is conferred on companies, and in some legal orders on natural objects (the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, Articles 71-74, applied by the Constitutional Court in judgment No. 1149-19-JP/21 of 10 November 2021; the Te Urewera Act 2014, section 11; the Te Awa Tupua Act 2017, section 14). The trend is uneven: the judgment of the High Court of Uttarakhand of 20 March 2017 on the legal personality of the Ganga and the Yamuna was stayed by the Supreme Court of India in July 2017, and it is a mistake to cite it as operative.

Hence a conclusion that applies both to a people and to a person: legal existence has turned out to be derived from a record kept by someone else. In the case of a person this is visible in the position of the stateless; in the case of a people, in citizenship standing in for the answer to who makes it up.

The infrastructure of the Earthlings people is built so that the record cannot exist without the person, and the person cannot be removed from the record by someone else's decision: the uniqueness of a living human being is confirmed, belonging ends only by their own decision or on their death, and the registry holds no data about views or voting.

Article 3 of the Declaration marks out the subject matter of the people's activity by means of the all-affected principle: what affects everyone is decided with the participation of everyone. This is a principle, not a list of topics: a list will go out of date; a principle will not.

The levels do not form a hierarchy: the Earthlings people does not review the decisions of states and cannot annul them. They are levels that differ in the range of questions they cover, not rungs on a ladder of force.

Here political theory has an unsolved problem: if all those affected are to decide, then someone must determine the circle of those affected, and any such determination is itself a decision taken for others. The practical answer: no one determines the circle - it is formed by those who have entered it of their own accord.

The law provides a form for every scale of association: marriage, partnership, community, association, municipality, people, state, international organization - but the last is a form for states, not for individuals. At the level of humanity there is no form.

Humanity is present in the law only as an object: the common heritage of mankind, crimes against humanity, a common concern with respect to climate, the interests of future generations. It is the one for whose sake, against whom, and about whom things are done - and never the one who acts.

Negligence is not the only reason. Humanity cannot be given a voluntary legal form: no one has joined it, it is involuntary by definition, and anyone who declares themselves humanity begins to speak for those who did not choose them. The Earthlings people is not a form of humanity and will not become one however large it grows: it is a form that, under the Declaration, is open to anyone and compulsory for no one, and it speaks only on behalf of those who have entered.

Freedom of association is enshrined as a universal right of every person in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 11 of the European Convention, paragraph 9.3 of the Document of the Copenhagen Meeting of the CSCE, Article 8 of the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights with respect to trade unions, and Article 15 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

International norms construe association broadly, as any voluntary community of individuals formed to express and protect common interests jointly; protection does not depend on state registration and extends to informal associations as well. None of the instruments cited sets out an exhaustive list of permissible forms or purposes.

One thing follows from this, and one thing only: the founding act itself is lawful. International law contains no prohibition of such an act.

Proposition. Freedom of association protects the act and its result from interference, but does not confer a status on the result: the legal nature of the resulting entity is determined by distinct rules, just as the status of a corporation is determined by corporate law and not by the law of associations. However many features an association accumulates, it remains an association.

Answer: the objection is correct, and we assert nothing to the contrary. Freedom of association does not secure the transition from an association to a people: it answers the second of the three questions in section 02, but not the third.

Our position is different: the law does not found peoples and keeps no register of them, and therefore the question is resolved by whichever body applies the law, on the basis of criteria and practice, when a specific claim arises. We present the criteria and the practice and propose that they be assessed on the merits. This assertion is weaker than the one we would like to make, and stronger than one that can be refuted.

Proposition. The category of "people" is tied to territory: a people is the population of a state, or the population of a territory claiming self-determination. A community that has never held territory and claims none does not fall within the category.

The answer proceeds in four steps, none of which relies on anyone's opinion.

First. No binding norm contains such a requirement. The UN Charter does not require a people to have territory, common Article 1 of the Covenants does not require it, and no convention requires it. Nor can the requirement be derived from a definition, since no definition exists - and this has been officially recorded.

Second. Where territory appears in the texts, it answers a different question - resolution 1541 (XV) classifies a territory, not a group; the safeguard clause of resolution 2625 (XXV) describes the conditions for protecting territorial integrity. Neither defines a people.

Third, and decisive for practice. The entire line of decisions rejecting the claims of groups on the merits concerns secession. The reports of the Commission of Jurists and the Commission of Rapporteurs of the League of Nations on the Aaland Islands (1920-1921) establish that positive international law does not recognize a right of national groups to separate from the state of which they form part. The Arbitration Commission of the Conference on Yugoslavia in Opinion No. 2 (11 January 1992) held that the Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia possesses the rights of a minority but not a right of self-determination entailing a change of borders. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in Katangese Peoples' Congress v. Zaire (1995) and Kevin Mgwanga Gunme et al. v. Cameroon (2009) concluded that self-determination is exercised in forms compatible with sovereignty and territorial integrity.

This line of decisions is consistent, and we cite it ourselves. But it establishes exactly what it says: a right of secession has been rejected. Not one of these decisions considered the voluntary founding of a non-territorial community claiming neither territory nor any change of borders. No such case has been brought. The precedents strike at a claim we do not make and are silent on the one we do.

Fourth. Recent practice has separated status from territory in another direction. On 9 November 2023 Australia and Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union Treaty (in force 28 August 2024); Article 2 records the parties' recognition that the statehood and sovereignty of Tuvalu will continue notwithstanding the effects of sea-level rise. On the same day the Pacific Islands Forum adopted a Declaration on the Continuity of Statehood; the Alliance of Small Island States adopted its own on 23 September 2024.

In 2025 the UN International Law Commission adopted the final report of the Study Group on sea-level rise: "with regard to States particularly affected by climate change-related sea-level rise, there is strong support among States for the continuity of statehood and sovereignty and the maintenance of international legal personality and membership of international organizations" (paragraph 35). It was further noted that Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention, "whose criteria are generally accepted for the purpose of identifying a State as a person or subject of international law, does not address the question of the continuity of statehood in the context of climate change-related sea-level rise" (paragraph 37).

Conclusion on the second objection. Binding norms contain no requirement of territory; none follows from a definition, since no definition exists; and practice has not established one, since the whole of the practice rejecting claims on the merits concerns secession. The question remains open - but open, not decided against us.

Proposition. Even if the question of peoplehood could be raised, there is nowhere to raise it. Practice accumulates in a procedural void.

Answer: as regards the question of peoplehood as such, the objection is correct and is accepted in full. The Human Rights Committee stated in Chief Bernard Ominayak and the Lubicon Lake Band v. Canada (communication No. 167/1984, views of 26 March 1990, UN Doc. CCPR/C/38/D/167/1984, paragraph 32.1):

General Comment No. 23 (1994) draws the same distinction: "The Covenant draws a distinction between the right to self-determination and the rights protected under article 27... Self-determination is not a right cognizable under the Optional Protocol" (paragraph 3.1).

Two related cases should be cited precisely, since each closes the door on a ground of its own. In Kitok v. Sweden (communication No. 197/1985, views of 27 July 1988, paragraph 6.3) the Committee stated that "the author, as an individual, could not claim to be the victim of a violation of the right of self-determination enshrined in article 1" - the ground here being the individual nature of the procedure. In Mikmaq Tribal Society v. Canada (communication No. 78/1980, decision of 29 July 1984) the communication was held inadmissible because the author had not shown authority to act on behalf of the community; that case does not bear on the question of peoplehood at all.

Three features of the objection should be noted precisely.

It is procedural, not substantive: the Committee does not say that the Lubicon Lake Band is not a people - it says that it is not empowered to decide that question in this procedure.

It closes the door to everyone alike, including peoples whose peoplehood no one disputes: the barrier is set by the nature of the Optional Protocol, not by any characteristic of the author. The absence of a forum is symmetrical: there is likewise nowhere to refute peoplehood authoritatively in this procedure.

And it does not deprive Article 1 of interpretive effect: in Apirana Mahuika et al. v. New Zealand (communication No. 547/1993, views of 27 October 2000) the Committee accepted that the provisions of Article 1 may be relevant in interpreting other rights under the Covenant, in particular Article 27.

Hence the conclusion: a status consolidates in a distributed fashion, or it does not consolidate at all. No other mechanism is available to anyone.

Proposition. States formalize a status when a community solves a problem that the states themselves face. A non-territorial people solves no such problem. Practice may accumulate for as long as one likes and still come to nothing.

We regard this objection as unrefuted; it is the most serious of those raised against us. We can answer it only with two observations, neither of which disposes of it.

First, we are not the only ones for whom the mechanism of conversion was missing. Indigenous peoples before the 1960s had neither a voice nor a body, and ILO Convention No. 107 (1957) required governments only to seek their collaboration - and yet organized practice led to written norms: the duty to consult (ILO Convention No. 169, Article 6), the right to participate in decision-making and the principle of free, prior and informed consent (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Articles 18-19), and judicial enforcement of these duties (Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Saramaka People v. Suriname, 2007). The mechanism did not precede the practice; it arose out of it.

Second, the problem for states may yet arise. Questions in which the interest at stake has no bearer today - climate displacement, the populations of disappearing states, stateless persons, future generations - are becoming more acute, and the absence of a party able to speak for those affected is becoming a problem for states as well.

We record the objection as standing.

This is the only known case in which an attempt to found a non-territorial people was made directly, and it bears on our question more closely than any other.

At the Fifth World Romani Congress in Prague on 24-28 July 2000, the International Romani Union adopted a Declaration of Nation proclaiming the Roma a non-territorial nation. The claim concerned not statehood but representation: it sought the conferral of the status of a non-territorial nation, with appropriate representation in international intergovernmental organizations.

Twenty-five years later, nothing has been recognized.

Here we need to be precise both ways. There was no formal refusal: no body considered the claim or ruled on it. It simply came to nothing, and there are no "reasons for refusal" to be examined point by point.

What can be asserted without going beyond the facts is this. A legal obstacle exists, and it applies to us in full: the concept of a people is not defined in binding norms, and settled practice ties it either to the population of a state or to a territorial community. No circumstance that would change this has arisen since 2000.

Besides the legal obstacle there was an evidentiary one, and this is our own observation. The law puts to any dispersed community the question of who belongs to it and who speaks in its name, and the answer must be established rather than asserted. In 2000 no such community had the means to answer it: membership in a dispersed population of millions could not in principle be established, and not through any fault of those making the claim. Confirmed individual belonging, a permanent registry, and an unalterable record of decisions were not available in 2000.

Let us weigh this honestly: we cannot say that "one of the reasons has fallen away", since no one ever stated any reasons. All that follows is that our scheme removes one of the difficulties of 2000, and that the legal obstacle remains.

In its advisory opinion of 11 April 1949 the International Court of Justice held that international legal personality is not confined to states: the UN was recognized as a subject of international law capable of bringing claims without being a state. The same opinion stated a more general principle: "The subjects of law in any legal system are not necessarily identical in their nature or in the extent of their rights, and their nature depends upon the needs of the community."

The range of subjects has widened within living memory: international organizations and the human being, who since Nuremberg bears international responsibility and holds internationally protected rights. Each time the widening followed function and need, not territory.

The Sovereign Military Order of Malta has held no territory since 1798, yet maintains diplomatic relations with more than a hundred states, holds permanent observer status at the UN General Assembly (resolution 48/265, 1994), and issues its own passports. The Holy See retained international legal personality from 1870 to 1929 while holding no territory at all.

This is confirmed not only by the practice of states but also by a judicial decision: in Nanni and Others v. Pace and the Sovereign Order of Malta the Court of Cassation of Italy (Annual Digest, 1935-1937, case No. 2) held that the Order, as an international entity, possesses its own legal personality and needs no state authorization for its acts.

In its advisory opinion of 22 July 2010 the International Court of Justice held by ten votes to four that the declaration of independence of Kosovo of 17 February 2008 did not violate international law, since "general international law contains no applicable prohibition of declarations of independence". The Court deliberately expressed no view either on the statehood of Kosovo or on the right of self-determination outside the colonial context.

Taiwan has functioned stably outside UN membership since 1971, when General Assembly resolution 2758 (XXVI) of 25 October 1971 removed the representatives of the former authorities from their seat in the Organization.

International law routinely develops through claims that, when made, had no basis in the norms in force.

The Truman Proclamation on the continental shelf (Proclamation 2667 of 28 September 1945) was a unilateral claim: no norm provided for it. It was followed by the practice of other states, and thirteen years later the claim had become a treaty norm (Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf, 29 April 1958).

The International Court of Justice in the North Sea Continental Shelf cases (judgment of 20 February 1969) assessed the proclamation in exactly these terms: it "soon came to be regarded as the starting point of the positive law on the subject", and the doctrine it advanced, of the original and exclusive right of the coastal state, prevailed over the others and was reflected in the 1958 Convention (paragraph 47). The exclusive economic zone followed a similar path within a single decade and was established by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The pattern "claim - practice - legal ascertainment" is a documented way in which international law changes.

In 1863 five private citizens of Geneva founded a committee for relief to the wounded: not a state, not an order with a sovereign past, not the creature of a treaty, but a private act of self-organization. A year and a half later, on their initiative, a diplomatic conference was convened and the first Geneva Convention (1864) was adopted; the committee itself was named in a treaty text only later, in the Geneva Convention of 1929.

Today the ICRC is a bearer of functional international legal personality: treaty mandates, headquarters agreements with dozens of states, observer status at the UN General Assembly (resolution 45/6 of 16 October 1990) - and yet in form it remains a private association under Swiss civil law. The sequence of events is crucial: the consent of states did not precede its emergence; that consent formalized a useful practice that had already taken shape.

The European Court of Human Rights in Sidiropoulos and Others v. Greece (1998) and Stankov and the United Macedonian Organisation Ilinden v. Bulgaria (2001) found a violation of Article 11 of the Convention in the suppression of organizations asserting an identity whose very existence the state denied.

The common heritage of mankind is enshrined in law for areas beyond national jurisdiction: "The Area and its resources are the common heritage of mankind" (Article 136 of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea); Article 11 of the 1979 Moon Agreement declares the same of the Moon and its resources. These regimes allow for an interest of humanity as a whole, but create no bearer made up of human beings themselves: in the Area, the Authority, whose members are the States Parties to the Convention, acts on behalf of mankind (Articles 137(2) and 156).

Supranational additional belonging is established by a norm: under Article 20(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, citizenship of the Union "shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship".

Graduated forms of participation - observer status, consultative participation, and other intermediate forms - confirm that international law encompasses not only the dichotomy "state or no status" but also a spectrum of participation.

Conclusion of the section: international law has developed through new forms of collectivity, new levels of belonging, and new formats of participation. It has also seen a case in which an attempt at non-territorial peoplehood came to nothing, and we named that case first.

UN Charter (26 June 1945), Article 1(2) - the development of friendly relations among nations "based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples".

The International Covenants on Human Rights (resolution 2200 A (XXI) of 16 December 1966), common Article 1(1) - "All peoples have the right of self-determination...".

Declaration on Principles of International Law (resolution 2625 (XXV) of 24 October 1970) - confirms the right of peoples freely to determine their political status without external interference and ends its list of the ways of exercising that right with the words "or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people".

Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (25 June 1993, part I, paragraph 2) - self-determination shall not be construed as authorizing the destruction of the territorial integrity of states that comply with the principle of equal rights and represent the whole population without discrimination.

Under common Article 1, peoples "freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development"; in the exercise of this right two dimensions are distinguished - the external, a change of borders or of the status of a territory, and the internal. What separates them is not the place of exercise but the consequence: the external one changes the configuration of states; the internal one does not change it.

The Supreme Court of Canada in the Quebec secession reference (Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217) established the primacy of internal self-determination: as a general rule the right is exercised without encroaching on territorial integrity, and the external form is an exception for extreme cases. It is this distinction, and only this, that we take from the decision.

The Earthlings people is being formed in keeping with the logic of internal, non-territorial, and voluntary self-determination: it requires no secession, makes no territorial claims, and claims no compulsory jurisdiction.

As recognized in law, the content of internal self-determination already includes a people's self-government in its own affairs: the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes the right of self-determination (Article 3) and spells it out as "autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs" (Article 4), with a safeguard clause on territorial integrity (Article 46) that mirrors ours. The International Court of Justice stated the substance of the right in its advisory opinion on Western Sahara (1975): what is decisive is the free and genuine expression of the will of the people itself, and the form is secondary.

The self-determination of the Earthlings people is exercised by means that public authority does not use, and in a subject matter to which it lays no claim. The people establishes belonging, forms a verifiable collective position of its participants, and conveys it by the word. Everything it does, it does by these means and by these alone. It is from this that the compatibility examined below follows: not as a concession agreed with states, but as a property of the scheme itself.

Belonging instead of jurisdiction - the people binds only those who have entered it, and only in matters of its own internal life. It has no territory and no jurisdiction over physical space, resources, or the populations of states, and claims none.

The word instead of force - the people's sole means are the statement, the appeal, and the argument; the implementation of its decisions rests on the participant acting voluntarily. Armed units, security forces, and the forcible enforcement of decisions are excluded by Article 5 of the Declaration, which forms part of the unamendable core.

Position instead of authority - the people produces a verifiable collective position and presents it. Taxation, criminal jurisdiction, and the regulation of domestic economies remain wholly with states; the people makes no claim to them.

Addition instead of replacement - belonging to the people is added to what a person already has, and does not affect their citizenship, their tax obligations, or the jurisdiction to which they are subject. Where applicable laws conflict, the mandatory norms of the relevant national jurisdiction prevail.

No conflict arises here, not because the people has given something up under pressure, but because the claim and the guarantee here are different in nature. The renunciation of violence in Article 5 of the Declaration is an obligation of the people towards itself and towards every human being, not a concession to states: it would hold even in the absence of any dispute about territorial integrity.

In international law the same acts carry different meanings depending on the capacity in which they are performed: in the doctrine of historic title only acts à titre de souverain, "in the capacity of a sovereign", are counted, while the same acts performed in a private capacity create nothing.

An openly declared claim is therefore not rhetoric but what legally characterizes the practice being accumulated: self-government exercised and documented in the capacity of a people matures into evidence of peoplehood, whereas the same years of practice without a declared capacity would mature only into a well-established association. Hence the requirements placed on the practice - openness, consistency, documentation: the registry, the verifiable votes, and the founding acts are a means of producing evidence, not a showcase.

No status in international law is confirmed for everyone at once by the decision of a single body: no court has ever certified any state. Statuses consolidate in a distributed fashion, through many small doors.

Hence the term the people's documents use for what is sought. Legal visibility means being treated as a people where a specific question arises: admission to a venue, a duty to consult, a classification in a particular case. It is neither granted by an act nor certified by a register, and it is therefore measured not by the date of a decision but by the number of doors that have opened.

The path of Palestine is instructive: admission to UNESCO as a member state on 31 October 2011; non-member observer State status - General Assembly resolution 67/19 of 29 November 2012; being a party to the Rome Statute since 1 April 2015 and the decision of Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court of 5 February 2021 finding that Palestine qualifies as "[t]he State on the territory of which the conduct in question occurred" for the purposes of article 12(2)(a) of the Statute.

The first doors exist even for an initiative of this kind: written submissions to the universal periodic review and to the UN special procedures are open to any civil society actor; consultative status with ECOSOC is attainable through a legal entity acting as its bearer, as the Saami Council participates while listed on the Roster, even though no one considers the Sami people a non-governmental organization; then come multilateral venues and observer statuses.

That the end point is attainable is strongly confirmed: the duty of states to consult indigenous peoples went, within the memory of a single generation, from a mere requirement to seek their collaboration (ILO Convention No. 107, 1957, Article 5) to a written obligation to consult (ILO Convention No. 169, Article 6; UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Articles 18-19; Saramaka People v. Suriname, 2007).

The design provides that the whole practice of self-government - votes with the date, question, turnout, result, and implementation recorded, movements of treasury funds, entries into the people, the work of Cells - is entered in a public chronicle that cannot be altered after the fact. The chronicle begins before the people takes shape: its first entry consists of the proposals on the founding text, the replies to them, and the result of the vote on its adoption. No people in history has a documented record of its life from its first day, because there was nothing to keep one with.

The conditions of legitimation are stated expressly: numbers and geographical spread beyond a local group; real participation, not signatures alone; the quality of procedures - honest identity verification, a secret ballot with a verifiable count, protection against the capture of governance; public accountability for rules, finances and the practice of governance, and for who makes up the people.

No quantitative indicator by itself creates a status in international law. For an honest assessment of development, four stages can be distinguished.

The Earthlings people does not assert that the mere fact of its emergence gives it the right to speak on behalf of humanity, and promises no status determined in advance.

For enquiries from states, international organizations, lawyers, and researchers: info@earth-lings.org

Official site: earth-lings.org

This document is a working public legal position and is refined as expert dialogue proceeds. It is among the documents open to proposals during the founding period: the procedure is set out in the document "The Founding Period".