Legal Basis

This text sets out the legal basis for the principles and mechanisms laid down in the Earthlings Declaration of Self-Determination. The Declaration states values and aims; this document examines whether the construction is legally admissible and how it might be classified in international law.

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

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

So that the reader sees from the outset what is being asserted and what is not.

First. The norms we rely on are in force today and binding on states: 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 (Article 1(2) of the UN Charter, common Article 1 of the 1966 Covenants). Not one of them is 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 any convention. There is more: no definition of a people exists at all, and this has been stated officially by the United Nations itself.

Third. The whole body of practice rejecting the claims of groups concerns secession - the Aaland Islands, Badinter, Katanga, Cameroon. The Earthlings people demands 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: the application of existing norms to a voluntarily founded non-territorial people has not been determined by international law. 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 writings 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; the doctrine on our question is unsettled and holds 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, it is said plainly.

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

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

Whether its emergence and activity are lawful - a question of norms in force, and it is closed 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 accumulates only through the acts of states and international bodies.

The third is the contested one, and on it our position coincides with 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 claims no territory, no taxation of populations, no criminal jurisdiction, and no monopoly on force. Membership 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 as a person confirmed, and knowingly take on an additional belonging. Until the founding period ends there are no such people at all, and no one can represent the Earthlings people today.

The task 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 people might find institutional expression.

Precision matters here more than a favourable impression.

A people defined by an adopted text does not yet exist. The Declaration exists as 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, is built and working - identity verification, the passport, the registry, voting, the public treasury: what is missing is an adopted founding text, not the means.

The order of founding is established and published in advance:

• 7 September 2026 - proposals open on the whole corpus: the Declaration, the Charter, and the other twenty-three documents, including this one. 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.
• 6 December 2026 - submissions close.
• 20 December 2026 - the full record of proposals and replies is published, including those rejected with the reason given; the final editions in Russian and English are published.
• 3 January 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 taking part, and no fewer than thirty per cent of their total number.

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 gives a temporary status carrying the right to vote on the day of adoption.

Two consequences for this document.

The first is unfavourable: wherever the features described below depend on numbers, composition, and accumulated practice, what is meant is the construction and its designed capacity, not a state that has been reached. There are no participants, 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 remains in a verifiable record.

The right of peoples to self-determination is fixed at the foundation 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: "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: the 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 repeated 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 but a statement by the Organization itself. 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 the reason no definition appeared: "Since no definition has been formulated, the United Nations has acted with caution in cases of political self-determination... It would be premature and even presumptuous to attempt to lay down here and now a definition which could be applied in all parts of the world and cover all situations" (paragraph 279).

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

Composition. No treaty determines who belongs to 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. Not a single person on Earth can produce a document certifying their belonging to a people - no French, Japanese, Kurdish or Sami person can.

A procedure for expressing will. Nowhere is it stated by what act the will of people becomes the will of a people. There is no order, 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: "Only States may be parties in cases before the Court." A people cannot appear as a party.

The indeterminacy persisted not through negligence. To define a people meant to give a right to groups inside existing states, and the traces of that decision are fixed in the documents themselves: the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (resolution 1514 (XV) of 14 December 1960), having proclaimed in paragraph 2 the right of peoples to self-determination, at once 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. The right of peoples to self-determination is exercisable by those peoples that already have a state of their own: the state knows the composition of its citizens, has a voting procedure, and is admitted to every international body - it closes all three missing elements by itself. A people without a state can neither establish its composition, nor express a will, nor bring that will anywhere. Those who have the right in fact hardly need it; those who need it cannot reach it.

Good faith requires that we ourselves point to the place in the binding texts where 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 authentic text is weaker here: "the whole people residing in that territory". Both texts are authentic, and we cite both rather than the one that suits us.

What follows from this and what does not.

Neither resolution contains a definition of a people. Resolution 1541 qualifies a territory, not a group: its subject is 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 put that question. Both are addressed to decolonization: their drafters were never confronted with the class of situations in which a community arises by the voluntary decision of people and claims no territory.

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

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 contain no prohibition of one.

The written norms in force know cases where self-identification is made the direct 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): 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 abstraction 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 by criteria.

The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in the Endorois case (communication 276/2003, decision of 2010): "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 criteria applied (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, exclusion, or discrimination.

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 "precisely for the ethnic groups and communities constituting the population of a State" (paragraph 199).

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 by 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 construction as built; filling these with content begins with the adoption of the founding text.

Composition. It is known who belongs to the people: 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 where one person is one vote, where a vote cannot be bought, accumulated, or irrevocably transferred. The first application of this procedure will be the adoption of the founding text itself.

Record. The composition and the results of votes are open to verification by any person, 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 appearance 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 closed in practice, and it was not always possible to close them - the means did not exist.

In practice, citizenship has taken the place of the missing answer about a people's composition. "The people of France" in fact means "the citizens of France": that is how constitutions are built, how statistics count, and how courts reason.

The substitution breaks 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 multi-ethnic 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 built 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 within that logic is meaningless.

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 the composition of the people is determined by the law on citizenship, that is, by the state itself. The founder is defined by the founded.

The consequences are concrete. A people divided by borders has the right and lacks the means to use it. A people deprived of citizenship remains a people and ceases to be anyone at all for the legal system. Peoples inside states are heard at international venues only through the very state with which they most often have a dispute. On planetary questions - climate, the environment, future generations - the law has recognized interests whose bearer does not exist.

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

United States. Federally recognized tribes determine the composition of 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 state 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, a person is entered who considers themselves Sami and who also meets one of the objective conditions - Sami being the first language of that person, of a parent, or of a grandparent, or descent from a person in the historical rolls.

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 belongs to 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 make the qualification to the last line ourselves: the legal grounds for burning a passport against the holder's will are limited to two cases, 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 so far operates procedurally, not technically. Separating the rights of issuance and burning has been entered in the roadmap.

The precise statement runs as follows: 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 is certified by a document issued by the people itself, tied neither to territory nor to descent, arising by 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 participants, the confirmation of their identity and the data connected with it "are not the property of a legal entity, cannot be transferred, sold, pledged or otherwise disposed of, and under no circumstances follow a legal entity", and that legal entities "are not the bearers of the people". Without that norm, the assertion would come down to a document issued by a commercial company.

The earthling passport does not replace state documents, and gives no citizenship, visas, right of entry, or consular protection. It certifies belonging to a people - which state documents do not certify at all.

No association manages without a decision on admission: states grant citizenship at their discretion, associations decide by resolution of a board, and even in indigenous rolls the decision is taken by a committee.

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 disposes of it.

The objection here is obvious: the recognized formula holds that a people determines its own membership, whereas here it is determined unilaterally by anyone who wishes. The answer: the people determined its membership once and for all by establishing a rule - belonging attaches to everyone who meets the four conditions and has decided to belong. Collective self-determination is exercised at the level of the rule rather than of individual cases; deciding each case at discretion is neither the only way nor the safer one, since where there is discretion there is also arbitrariness.

We name three qualifications ourselves. The annulment of an initially unlawful issuance ends belonging against the person's will - this is not a measure of liability but a finding that belonging never lawfully arose. Identity verification may fail; a refusal is not final, and the number of attempts is not limited. And verification rests on an identity document: a person without citizenship and without documents cannot enter today - this restriction contradicts the logic of the rest of the construction and is among the open questions.

Freedom of exit here differs sharply from 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 leave to: the planet is divided without remainder, 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 retains human rights formally and 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 dispose of 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 membership gives little. The more the people gives, the dearer exit will become, and only then will this guarantee be truly tested.

The term "natural person" appeared not in place of 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, identically 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 line develops unevenly: 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 to cite it as operative is a mistake.

Hence a conclusion that applies both to a people and to a person: legal existence 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 the substitution of citizenship for composition.

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, and the registry holds no data about views or voting.

Article 7 of the Declaration defines the subject matter of the people's activity by two features: no single state decides the question alone, and the consequences fall on those who had no voice. This is the all-affected principle, expressed through features rather than through a list of topics.

The levels do not form a hierarchy: the Earthlings people does not review the decisions of states and cannot annul them. These are different levels by range of questions, not steps in a ladder of force.

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

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 people. At the level of humanity there is no form.

Humanity is present in the law exclusively 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, the one against whom, and the one about whom - and never the one who acts.

The reason is not only negligence. Humanity cannot receive a voluntary legal form: no one 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 at any size: it is a form available to anyone and obligatory for no one, and it speaks only on behalf of those who have entered.

Freedom of association is established as a universal right of every person: 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, Article 15 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

International norms understand association broadly - as any voluntary community of people for the joint expression and protection of common interests; state registration is not a condition of protection, which extends to informal associations as well. None of the instruments listed sets out an exhaustive list of permissible forms or purposes.

From this one thing follows, 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 formation that arises is determined by separate 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, an association is what it remains.

Answer: the objection is correct, and we assert nothing to the contrary. The transition from an association to a people is not secured by freedom of association: it answers the second of the three questions in section 02 and does not answer 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 the body applying the law, by criteria and by 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 the one that can be refuted.

Proposition. The category "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 is built in four steps, and not one of them relies on anyone's opinion.

First. No binding norm contains such a requirement. The UN Charter does not require territory of a people, 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 stated officially.

Second. Where territory appears in the texts, it answers a different question - resolution 1541 (XV) qualifies 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 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 that changes 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 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 arisen. The precedents strike at a claim we do not make and are silent on the one we do.

Fourth. The practice of recent years 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 approved the final report of the Study Group on sea-level rise: "with respect 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 for the preservation of international legal personality and membership in international organizations" (paragraph 35). It was noted separately that Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention, "whose criteria are generally accepted for the purpose of determining a State as a person or subject of international law, does not resolve the question of the continuity of statehood in this context" (paragraph 37).

Conclusion on the second objection. A requirement of territory is not contained in binding norms, does not follow from a definition since none exists, and has not been established by practice, since the whole of the adverse practice 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 into a procedural void.

Answer: the objection is correct and is accepted in full. The Human Rights Committee 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 neighbouring cases should be cited precisely, since each closes the door on its own ground. 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 character 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.

The objection has three properties that 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 equally to everyone, including peoples whose peoplehood no one disputes: the barrier is set by the nature of the Optional Protocol, not by any characteristic of the applicant. 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 effect in interpretation: 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 distributed fashion, or it does not consolidate at all. No other mechanism exists for 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 turn into nothing.

This objection we regard as unrefuted, and it is the most serious of those addressed to us. We have nothing to answer with except two observations, neither of which removes it.

The first: the mechanism of conversion was missing not only for us. Indigenous peoples before the 1960s had no voice, no body, and no one under any obligation to reckon with them - 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.

The second: the problem for states may yet appear. Questions that today have no bearer of the interest - climate displacement, the populations of disappearing states, stateless persons, future generations - are sharpening, and the absence of a party able to speak for those affected becomes 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: what was sought was 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.

Precision is needed here in both directions. There was no formal refusal: no body considered the claim or ruled on it. It simply led to nothing, and "reasons for refusal" to be examined point by point do not exist.

What can be asserted while remaining within the facts. A legal obstacle is present and applies to us in full measure: 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. Who speaks for the community, who belongs to it, whether that can be established rather than asserted - the claim of 2000 could not answer these questions: representation was contested, and membership in a dispersed population of millions could not be established in principle - and not through any fault of those making the claim - the means for it did not exist. Confirmed individual membership, 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 formulated any reasons. It follows only that one of the difficulties of 2000 is removed in our construction, 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 formulated 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 circle of subjects has widened within living memory: first international organizations, then 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 in 1870-1929 while holding no territory at all.

This is confirmed not only by the practice of states but 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 passed no judgment either on the statehood of Kosovo or on the right of self-determination outside the colonial context.

Taiwan has functioned durably 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 develops as a matter of course 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 travelled a similar path within a single decade and was fixed by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The pattern "claim - practice - legal recognition" 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. Within a year, on their initiative, a diplomatic conference was convened and the first Geneva Convention (1864) was adopted, building the committee into international law.

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 in form it remains a private association under Swiss civil law. The order of events is essential: the consent of states did not precede its emergence, it formalized a useful practice that had already taken place.

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 established 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 admit an interest of humanity as a whole, but create no bearer able to assert it.

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 knows not only the dichotomy "state or no status" but a spectrum of participation.

Conclusion of the section: international law knows development through new forms of collectivity, new levels of belonging, and new formats of participation. It also knows a case in which an attempt at non-territorial peoplehood led 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 Covenants on 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 closes the list of ways of exercising it 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 dismemberment of the territorial integrity of states that comply with the principle of equal rights and represent the whole population without discrimination.

Common Article 1 establishes two branches: a people "freely determines its political status" - the external branch, a change of borders or of the status of a territory - and "freely pursues its economic, social and cultural development" - the internal branch. What separates them is not the place of exercise but the consequence: the external changes the configuration of states, the internal changes nothing in any state.

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 formed in the logic of internal, non-territorial, and voluntary self-determination: it requires no secession, asserts no territorial claims, and claims no compulsory jurisdiction.

The content of internal self-determination as recognized in law 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 unfolds it as "autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs" (Article 4), with a reservation on territorial integrity (Article 46) that mirrors ours. The substance of the right was stated by the International Court of Justice in the advisory opinion on Western Sahara (1975): what decides is the free and genuine expression of the will of the people itself, and the form is secondary.

The self-determination of Earthlings is additive, not subtractive: it adds a belonging without taking anything from states, and is therefore incapable by construction of encroaching on territorial integrity - the object of encroachment is absent.

No territorial claims - no territory, and no jurisdiction over physical space, resources, or the populations of states.

Renunciation of coercion and of a monopoly on force - armed formations, security structures, and the forcible enforcement of decisions are excluded.

Renunciation of the classical functions of public authority - no claims to taxation, criminal jurisdiction, or the regulation of the internal economies of states.

Compatibility with national citizenship - where applicable laws conflict, the mandatory norms of the relevant national jurisdiction prevail.

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 a legal qualifier of the practice being accumulated: self-government exercised and documented in the capacity of a people matures into evidence of peoplehood, whereas the same years 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 public votes, and the founding acts are the production of evidence, not a shop window.

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

Hence the term by which the documents of the people denote what is sought. Legal cognizability is 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 not granted by an act and not 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; the status of an observer state - General Assembly resolution 67/19 of 29 November 2012; treatment as a state party for the purposes of the Rome Statute - decision of Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court of 5 February 2021.

The first doors exist for an initiative of this kind as well: 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 bearer legal entity, 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 confirmed in strong form: the duty of states to consult peoples that have no state travelled, within the memory of a single generation, from complete absence to a written norm (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 execution recorded, movements of treasury funds, admissions to membership, 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 is the proposals to the founding text, the replies to them, and the result of the vote on its adoption. No people in history holds a documented record of its life from the first day, because there was nothing to keep one with.

The conditions of legitimation are stated directly: numbers and geographical spread beyond a local circle; real participation, not signatures alone; the quality of procedures - honest identity verification, transparent voting, protection against capture of governance; public accountability for rules, finances, composition, and the practice of governance.

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 appearance 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".