Legal Justification

for the Formation of the Earthlings People as a Voluntary Transnational Community of the 21st Century

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was a response to the catastrophes of the twentieth century and established the fundamental rights of the individual.

Today, humanity faces a different type of threat: ecological destabilisation, technological risks, growing interdependence among states, and the absence of adequate mechanisms for the direct expression of planetary-scale interests.

The Earthlings People is examined in this document as an attempt at a legal response to this new historical context: not to replace the existing system of international law, but to advance it - through the voluntary transnational self-organisation of individuals who recognise a shared responsibility for human life, the planet, and future generations.

A New People for a New Era

INTRODUCTION

About This Document

Connection to the Founding Documents

This text sets out the legal justification for the principles and mechanisms articulated in the Earthlings Declaration. The Declaration formulates the values, objectives, and purpose of the initiative; this document examines its legal admissibility, logic, and possible characterisation within the system of international law.

Purpose of this document: to demonstrate that the idea of the Earthlings People is not an arbitrary utopia or journalistic metaphor, but may be considered a serious attempt to articulate a new legal form of voluntary transnational community in response to the planetary challenges of the twenty-first century.

Intended audience: lawyers, analysts, international law scholars, representatives of international organisations, and intellectually demanding or sceptical readers for whom it is important to see a coherent line of argument.

Methodological approach: we proceed from the premise that the formation of a new legal institution requires a triad of elements:

The Will of the Individual

Expressed in the Earthlings Declaration - a public act of voluntary self-determination and accession to the community.

Legal Justification

Set out in this document - through an analysis of applicable norms, doctrines, analogies, and legal constraints.

Technological Implementation

Described in the technical documentation - as a set of mechanisms for transparency, identification, accountability, and voluntary participation.

Core novelty: for the first time, a people is conceived not as a consequence of common origin, territory, or historically formed ethnocultural destiny, but as the result of the deliberate, open, and voluntary choice of individuals united by shared legal and civilisational principles.

The Legal Position in Three Sentences

The entire legal position of this document comes down to three sentences, and we state them at the outset, so that the reader can see from the start exactly what is being claimed and what is not:

"Earthlings rests on two operative norms of international law: freedom of association and the right of peoples to self-determination. Both norms are in force; their application to a voluntary non-territorial people is a question the law has not yet had to decide. We acknowledge this openly and answer it the way such questions have always been settled: by practice."

In other words: not one of the norms we rely on is invented or proposed "for the future" - both exist and bind states today. What is new is only their combination as applied to a people of a new type, and the fate of such new combinations in law has always been decided in the same way - by the accumulation of real, verifiable practice.

SECTION 01

Conceptual Legal Foundations

Three Core Legal Foundations of the Earthlings People

Freedom from Systems of Domination

The right of individuals to create forms of association and infrastructure in which technology, economics, and governance serve the person rather than rendering them an object of control.

The Right to the Preservation of Life

Recognition of human life, the natural environment, and the conditions of existence of future generations as supreme values requiring legal protection.

Transnational Self-Determination

A contemporary form for the exercise of the right to self-determination in circumstances where a community arises by the will of individuals and is not defined by territory, ethnicity, or statehood.

The formation of the Earthlings People is proposed as an exercise of the fundamental right to collective self-determination in a globalised world. This initiative does not negate historical forms of peoplehood, but raises the question of the possibility of their further evolution.

Legal Characterisation

The Earthlings People is understood as a voluntary transnational community, founded on the free self-determination of individuals united by shared principles of planetary responsibility, human rights, intergenerational justice, and technological ethics.

Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights establishes that all peoples have the right to self-determination. This document does not assert that existing international law already directly describes this precise form of peoplehood; it demonstrates that its discussion does not contradict the basic logic of international law and may be reasoned within its framework.

The fundamental distinction between the Earthlings People and any association, NGO, or social movement is this: Earthlings create not a thematic organisation but a form of belonging - with verified identity, democratic self-governance, a permanent registry, and a mechanism for collective expression of will. It is precisely this combination - registry, self-governance, verification - that distinguishes a people from a group of people with shared interests.

The right to self-determination has historically been applied to already existing peoples. However, nowhere in international law is there a prohibition on the formation of new peoples - every currently existing people once came into being. Earthlings do not claim territory and do not threaten state sovereignty; they propose an additional level of belonging, compatible with any citizenship.

Self-Determination and Already-Existing Belonging

The right to self-determination belongs to peoples, not to the isolated individual - and in this lies not the weakness of the Earthlings position, but its foundation. Every member of Earthlings already belongs to a self-determining people and therefore already stands within this right. Legally, the passage from a personal decision to a collective subject is secured by a combination of recognised norms: freedom of association (Art. 22 ICCPR, Art. 20 UDHR), the openness of the category "a people" (international law fixes no exhaustive definition of it), and the substantive marks of peoplehood - a shared situation, shared principles, self-identification, and institutional will. The Earthlings people is not derived from any single source: it is formed by the lawful exercise of the freedom of association by people who are already bearers of collective self-determination, and acquires it as a constituted community.

An Important Clarification on Representation

The Earthlings People does not claim to represent all of humanity. The concepts of "humanity" and "civilisation" carry broad philosophical significance, but they do not possess a defined mechanism for the expression of collective will.

At this stage, the reference is exclusively to those individuals who:

freely acceded to the Earthlings Declaration;
completed the prescribed procedural verification of individual uniqueness;
consciously assumed the additional identity of a community member.

Accordingly, the task of the initiative is not the usurpation of the voice of humanity, but the creation of a legal mechanism and precedent capable of demonstrating how the transnational will of individuals on matters of planetary scale may be institutionally expressed.

Identification of a Systemic Gap

The contemporary international system is predominantly organised vertically:

the individual obtains political representation primarily through the state;
states are represented in international organisations;
international organisations operate primarily through the will of their member states.

What is absent is a stable horizontal level - a legally formalised bond among people of different states as a unified voluntary community capable of:

expressing a common will on planetary matters;
making collective decisions outside the framework of national representation;
bearing its own institutional accountability for such decisions.

The legal gap consists in the fact that the actual membership of every human being in a single planet and their dependence on shared risks are not accompanied by a commensurate legal mechanism for the collective expression of will at the transnational level.

SECTION 02

Doctrinal Foundations in International Law

Justice as a Source of Legal Evolution

In international law, justice carries not only moral but also legal significance as part of the general principles of law referred to in Article 38(1)(c) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice.

Statute of the International Court of Justice, Article 38(1)(c)

"The Court shall apply... general principles of law recognised by civilised nations."

In the planetary dimension, justice encompasses at least four interrelated elements: intergenerational justice, environmental justice, justice of participation in global governance, and the equitable distribution of the risks and benefits of technological development.

Evolution of the Concept of "a People"

Contemporary international law does not reduce the concept of a people exclusively to ethnic origin or full state independence. The practice of decolonisation, the development of indigenous peoples' rights, and the expansion of forms of collective identity demonstrate that the legal category of "a people" has historically evolved and acquired new content.

In the case of East Timor (Portugal v. Australia), the International Court of Justice affirmed the erga omnes character of the right of peoples to self-determination. This is significant not because it automatically validates any new project of peoplehood, but because it illustrates the fundamental place of self-determination within the international legal order.

For the legal assessment of the Earthlings People, what is relevant is not ethnic characteristics, but the combination of the following criteria:

a shared historical situation - the recognition by individuals of common vulnerability to planetary threats;
unity of principles - agreement on fundamental values and objectives as set out in the Declaration;
self-identification - the formal and voluntary accession to the community;
will toward institutional organisation - the creation of procedures, bodies, rules of participation, and accountability.

Objective and Subjective Marks of a People

In international legal doctrine - that is, in the expert texts to which lawyers turn where treaties give no ready definition - it is customary to divide the marks of a people into objective and subjective. The most frequently cited summary is the outcome of the 1989 UNESCO meeting of experts. It is built as follows: a people is a group of individual human beings who share some or all of the following common features: a common historical tradition; racial or ethnic identity; cultural homogeneity; linguistic unity; religious or ideological affinity; territorial connection; common economic life. Beyond that, the group must be of a certain number, which need not be large, and - the only requirement formulated as mandatory - must have the will to be identified as a people or the consciousness of being a people; it is desirable, too, that it possess institutions through which the community expresses its features and its will.

It is worth reading closely the very wording of this source. The objective list is built disjunctively - "some or all": not one of the seven features, territorial connection included, is named as mandatory. Mandatory status is given only to the subjective core - will and self-awareness. This is not an interpretation bent in our favour; it is a literal reading of the text.

Measured against this list, Earthlings passes on more than the subjective core alone. Of the objective list, at least two features are directly expressed in Earthlings. The first is ideological affinity: the community is gathered around a system of values explicitly formulated and personally signed by every member; in most classical peoples this feature exists only as a diffuse tradition that no one has signed. The second is common economic life, still in the making: its own unit of account, the cells, a common fund, an internal economy of mutual support. To these are added numbers (growing) and institutions: the infrastructure of self-government - the registry, voting, the cells, the treasury - has been built and deployed; the Independent Council is provided for in the founding documents and is formed once the membership has been assembled. The subjective core, for its part, is expressed with rare definiteness: self-awareness is set down in a publicly signed Declaration, and the collective will is formalised through the procedures of accession and verification of personal uniqueness - every member is confirmed as a living, unique person, and that consent is on record.

For completeness, let us also name the source that reads differently - a good-faith analysis does not hide what is inconvenient. The study by the UN Special Rapporteur Aureliu Cristescu (1981) mentions a connection with territory among the characteristics of a people. Three circumstances keep this from being a decisive objection: the wording was produced in the age of decolonisation, when every claimant to self-determination, without exception, was territorial; Cristescu himself stipulates that he is not proposing a binding definition; and the doctrine as a whole remains unsettled to this day - and an unsettled doctrine, by definition, excludes no one.

The subjective school also has a lineage much older than the disputes of the twentieth century. Its founding text is Ernest Renan's lecture "What Is a Nation?" (Sorbonne, 1882). Renan rejected language, race, religion and geography, one after another, as foundations of a nation, and defined it through a "daily plebiscite" - the continuing consent of people to live together (a plebiscite is a vote of an entire people; Renan's point was that a nation exists so long as its people choose it anew each day). Earthlings makes this plebiscite verifiable for the first time in history: entry is verified, continuing participation is observable, exit is free at any moment.

Finally, positive law - the written norms already in force - knows cases where self-identification is placed directly at the foundation of a status. ILO Convention No. 169 names self-identification the "fundamental criterion" for being counted among the indigenous peoples (Article 1(2)); the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognises the right of peoples to determine their own identity and membership (Article 33).

From this follows a more general thesis as well: peoples arise not only out of a common past, but also out of a jointly chosen future. Recognising this does not dilute the concept of a people - the stability of the community, collective will, reproducibility, and the existence of institutions remain obligatory; it merely frees the concept from being identified exclusively with origin and territory.

The Common Heritage of Mankind and Structural Limitations of the Existing System

The doctrine of the common heritage of mankind has already been recognised in relation to a number of domains beyond national jurisdiction: the seabed, outer space, and other objects of common significance. At the same time, international climate, environmental, and technological regimes demonstrate that global risks affect individuals directly, yet the mechanisms for their representation remain predominantly state-mediated.

Within this logic, the Earthlings People does not claim ownership of the common heritage and does not propose to circumvent existing institutions. It is conceived as a supplementary mechanism for expressing the interests of individuals affected directly by planetary matters and outside the framework of any single national jurisdiction.

SECTION 03

International Precedents and Legal Analogies

Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The development of international standards on indigenous peoples' rights demonstrates that a people may possess the right to self-determination and collective legal personality without necessarily coinciding with the form of a sovereign state.

Supranational Additional Identity

European citizenship has demonstrated that supranational belonging can supplement rather than supplant national citizenship. For the Earthlings People, this matters as an analogy of additional, rather than competing, identity.

Graduated Forms of International Participation

Observer status, consultative participation, and other intermediate forms of engagement confirm that international law recognises not only the rigid dichotomy of "state / no status," but a more complex spectrum of participation.

Legal Personality Beyond the Classical Model

The recognition of the rights of nature, the international legal personality of certain organisations, and the development of common heritage regimes demonstrate that law is already capable of expanding the circle of subjects and interest-holders when the protection of significant goods so requires.

The Growing Role of Transnational Civil Society

Non-governmental organisations, expert networks, and global coalitions have long participated in international processes. The Earthlings People differs from them in that it proposes not only thematic advocacy, but also a form of voluntary collective belonging with an internal legitimation procedure.

Digital Forms of Association

The digital environment has become a stable space for association, coordination, and participation. This does not supersede law, but transforms the factual conditions under which individuals are capable of creating enduring transnational communities.

ICJ Advisory Opinion of 1949 (Reparation for Injuries)

In 1949, the International Court of Justice established a fundamental principle: international legal personality is not limited to states. The United Nations was recognised as a subject of international law capable of bringing international claims, despite not being a state. This opinion opened the door for recognising the legal personality of non-state entities - and remains the key precedent for any transnational community seeking limited legal personality. At the same time, the Court derived the legal personality of the United Nations from the will of the states that created it, whereas Earthlings is established by the will of individuals and relies not on delegation by states, but on the freedom of association and the gradual accumulation of external trust. This distinction is acknowledged openly and refines the analogy rather than weakening it.

In the same opinion the Court articulated a principle broader than its particular conclusion about the United Nations: the subjects of law in any legal system are not necessarily identical in their nature and in the extent of their rights - their nature depends on the needs of the community. The circle of subjects of international law has already widened within living memory: first international organisations, then the human being (since Nuremberg the individual bears international responsibility and holds internationally protected rights). Each time, the widening followed function and need, not territory.

The Sovereign Order of Malta

The Sovereign Order of Malta has no territory, yet is recognised by 112 states, holds observer status at the United Nations, issues passports, and maintains diplomatic relations. This shows that international legal personality is possible without territory and without the classical attributes of statehood. It should be borne in mind that the personality of the Order rests on historical continuity - it was a sovereign entity before the loss of Malta in 1798 - and on recognition by states; the Order therefore serves not as an identity, but as proof of the fundamental possibility of non-territorial legal personality, toward which the Earthlings People moves by a different path - through growth, practice, and good faith.

Kosovo (ICJ, 2010) and Taiwan

In 2010, the International Court of Justice held in an advisory opinion that this particular declaration of Kosovo's independence did not in itself violate international law: general international law contains no prohibition of declarations of independence. The Court deliberately passed no judgment either on Kosovo's statehood or on the right to self-determination - but the precedent itself shows that the international order is capable of receiving a unilateral constitutive act without treating it as a violation. Taiwan has functioned stably since 1971 outside membership in the United Nations - an example of the international order tolerating participants beyond the binary of "a sovereign state or no status" (while nevertheless remaining a territorial entity and not serving as a direct analogy to a non-territorial people). These precedents show: international law is capable of accommodating new forms of collective existence when the institutional reality becomes sufficiently compelling.

The Qualification of Peoplehood in Judicial Practice: Endorois and Ogiek

The question "is this group a people" is not an abstraction with no one to resolve it. It is actually resolved by courts and commissions when a group brings a concrete claim. The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights in the case of the Endorois community (Endorois v Kenya, 2010) and the African Court in the case of the Ogiek people (African Commission v Kenya, 2017) expressly qualified specific communities as "peoples" for the purposes of the collective rights of the African Charter - applying criteria that include the community's self-identification. It should be borne in mind: both communities are territorial and indigenous, and the category of "peoples" there belongs to a specific regional treaty. What this precedent proves is not the outcome of our case but the existence of the very practice of qualification by criteria: peoplehood is established by the body applying the law when a concrete question arises - no prior "registration of peoples" exists for anyone.

The Mechanism of Unilateral Claim: The Continental Shelf and the Exclusive Economic Zone

International law routinely develops through claims that had no basis in the norms in force at the moment they were made. The Truman Proclamation on the continental shelf (1945) was a pure unilateral claim - no norm provided for it. The practice of other states followed, and thirteen years later the claim had become a treaty norm (the Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf, 1958), while the International Court of Justice in the North Sea Continental Shelf cases (1969) was already treating it as the starting point of an established custom. The same path - from unilateral declarations to a universal norm - was travelled within a single decade by the exclusive economic zone. The pattern "claim -> practice -> legal ascertainment" is a documented way in which international law changes. One caveat: those were the claims of states; Earthlings relies on the mechanism by which claims mature, not on the identity of the claimants.

The International Committee of the Red Cross: Personality Grown from Private Initiative

In 1863 five private citizens of Geneva founded a committee for the relief of the wounded - not a state, not an order with a sovereign past, not a creature of treaty, but a private self-organisation. Within a year, on their initiative, a diplomatic conference had been convened and the first Geneva Convention adopted (1864), embedding the committee in international law. Today the ICRC is a bearer of functional international legal personality: treaty mandates, headquarters agreements with dozens of states, observer status in the UN General Assembly - and yet in its form it remains to this day a private association under Swiss civil law. The order of events here is decisive: the consent of states did not precede the emergence - it gave form to a useful practice that had already taken place. One caveat: the ICRC's function is narrow and humanitarian, and its personality is limited; the precedent proves not that "Earthlings will receive the same", but that the path itself - "private self-organisation -> practice -> formalisation by states" - is passable.

Section conclusion: international law already acknowledges evolution through new forms of collectivity, new levels of belonging, and new formats of participation. The Earthlings People is proposed not as a break from this logic, but as its further development in response to the planetary challenges of the twenty-first century.

SECTION 04

Specific Legal Foundations

Core Norms of International Law

UN Charter (1945), Article 1(2)

Recognises respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples as one of the purposes of the United Nations.

Declaration on Principles of International Law (1970)

Affirms the right of peoples to freely determine their political status without external interference.

Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993)

Clarifies that self-determination must not be construed as authorising the dismemberment of the territorial integrity of states that comply with the principle of equal rights and represent the whole population without discrimination.

Declaration on the Right to Development (1986)

Links the development of peoples to the full realisation of human rights and emphasises the collective dimension of participation in historical development.

Legal Construction of the Initiative

Before describing the construction, let us separate three questions that debates about "legal personality" constantly fuse together - half of the objections to Earthlings arise precisely from that fusion. The first question is the existence of the community. That is a question of fact: a community of people has either taken shape or it has not, and no one's consent is required here. The second is the lawfulness of its emergence and activity. That is a question of norms in force, and it is closed by freedom of association: people are expressly permitted to create voluntary communities. The third is international legal personality - the recognised capacity to bear rights and obligations at the international level in one's own name. It does indeed accumulate only through the acts of states and international bodies - and Earthlings nowhere claims otherwise. Of the three layers only the third is contested, and on it our position coincides with the classical one: recognition is a destination, not an entry ticket.

The Earthlings People is formed within the logic of internal, non-territorial, and voluntary self-determination. It does not require secession, makes no territorial claims, and does not assert coercive jurisdiction over persons or territories.

Let us specify what the word "internal" means here. Common Article 1 of the 1966 Covenants establishes two branches of self-determination: a people "freely determines its political status" - the external branch, a change in state borders or in 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: external self-determination changes the configuration of states; internal self-determination changes nothing within states. The Supreme Court of Canada, in the Quebec secession reference (Reference re Secession of Quebec, 1998; secession is the departure of part of a territory from a state), affirmed 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 Canadian decision.

Let us also speak plainly about the limits: no direct precedent of internal self-determination by a non-territorial people exists, and we do not hide this. But a territorial condition is contained neither in the text of Article 1 nor in the substance of the distinction. And the content of internal self-determination already recognised by law includes a people's self-government in its own affairs: the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognises the right of peoples to self-determination (Article 3) and unfolds it precisely as "autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs" (Article 4) - with an express safeguard of territorial integrity (Article 46) that mirrors our own. Members of Earthlings, meanwhile, remain entirely within the legal frameworks of their states: citizenship, taxes and jurisdiction are untouched; the community's self-government occupies the layer of voluntary associational life that states do not monopolise in any case.

The openness of the possible forms is confirmed by the Declaration on Principles of International Law (1970) as well: in listing the modes of implementing self-determination, it closes the list with the words "or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people". Earthlings, in doing so, determines its own collective form only - the status of no state and no territory is affected. The substance of the right was stated by the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion on Western Sahara (1975): what decides is the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned; the form is secondary.

The primary legal support for this construction is the freedom of association. It is enshrined 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 for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, paragraph 9.3 of the Copenhagen Document of the CSCE, as well as a number of specialised treaties (for example, Article 8 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - as regards the right to form trade unions - and 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. For this reason, the very emergence of Earthlings as a voluntary transnational community lies within the bounds of an expressly recognised right, and not in a legal grey area.

Unlike separatist self-determination, which is directed toward the subtraction of territory and sovereignty, the self-determination of Earthlings is additive in nature: it adds a belonging without taking anything away from states. By its very construction, therefore, it is incapable of encroaching upon territorial integrity - there is no object of encroachment.

Its intended function is to create a legitimate mechanism for coordination and the expression of will on matters that:

by their nature transcend any single jurisdiction;
affect the shared conditions of life on the planet;
do not receive adequate representation owing to the structural limitations of existing institutions.

Typology of the Legal Gap

The gap to which the Earthlings initiative responds is manifest with particular clarity in several domains:

Pandemics and Biological Risks

International norms primarily regulate state action, while transnational civil coordination and long-term public alert mechanisms remain underdeveloped.

Artificial Intelligence

Decisions with planetary consequences are made by a limited number of states and corporations, while the affected population lacks a commensurate mechanism for the collective expression of a position.

Climate and Future Generations

The consequences of current decisions extend decades into the future, yet future generations themselves do not possess procedural representation within existing institutions.

Common pattern: existing subjects of international law remain necessary, but are not always sufficient for the representation of the long-term and transnational interests of individuals as a shared planetary community.

The Principle of Good Faith (Bona Fides)

The Earthlings People must be assessed from the standpoint of the good faith of its declared objectives and procedures. This entails the open acknowledgement of its own limitations:

representation concerns only voluntary participants, not all of humanity;
the initiative does not claim a monopoly on the expression of planetary interests;
its legitimacy must be confirmed through growth in participation, transparency of procedures, and external good-faith verifiability;
it must act as a complement to the existing legal order, not as its negation;
openness of motive: the initiative explains directly why the category of "a people" was chosen and what legal consequences it expects to build up over time. Openness of calculation is an element of good faith, not its opposite: fictions are what people conceal, and a claim stated on the first page cannot be a fiction.

SECTION 05

Technological Implementation of Legal Principles

The technological layer of the initiative is meaningful only insofar as it reinforces the legal principles of voluntariness, accountability, and verifiability. Technology is considered here not as a source of legitimacy in itself, but as an instrument of discipline and demonstrability.

From Declarations to Procedural Guarantees

Law has traditionally relied on commitments, procedures, and institutional oversight. The Earthlings People proposes to supplement this with technological guarantees where they genuinely enhance confidence:

transparency: key decisions are recorded in a publicly verifiable system;
immutability of procedures: fundamental rules cannot be silently rewritten retroactively;
verifiability: compliance with procedures may be independently verified;
right of exit: participation does not become irrevocable or coerced.

Correspondence Between Technical Solutions and Legal Principles

Voluntariness

Legal norm: freedom of association includes the freedom not to participate in an association. Technological implication: there must be a genuine, not merely nominal, mechanism for a participant to exit the community.

Equality of Participation

Legal principle: one person must not possess multiple units of political weight through technical manipulation alone. Technological implication: a procedure for confirming individual uniqueness is required, precluding multiple accounts and the purchase of voting rights.

Non-Commercial Character of Collective Will

Legal principle: representation must not become a tradeable asset. Technological implication: governance mechanisms cannot reduce to financial control over votes.

Stability of Core Principles

Legal principle: fundamental norms are not altered by a chance majority. Technological implication: modification of the core principles must require an enhanced procedure and an elevated threshold of consent.

Key thesis: blockchain, digital identity, and other instruments matter here not as fashionable attributes of Web3, but as means of reinforcing legally significant qualities - verifiability, the limitation of arbitrariness, equality of procedure, and ongoing accountability.

SECTION 06

Institutional Features of a Voluntary Transnational People

This section does not claim that the Earthlings people holds greater rights than historically established peoples, nor does it call into question the legitimacy of existing forms of peoplehood. Yet the very architecture of a voluntary transnational people has a number of features that allow a fresh look at some of the marks of peoplehood traditionally considered by international law.

These features arise not from any special legal privileges, but from a combination of voluntary self-determination, verified identity, transparent procedures and modern means of provability.

From Indirect Marks to Observable Facts

For most of history the existence of a people was established indirectly: through common history, language, culture, origin, territory, stable forms of social life and other marks of collective identity.

The Earthlings model does not abolish the significance of these marks, but for the first time makes it possible to render a number of traditionally presumed characteristics of peoplehood directly observable and verifiable.

This is its principal institutional feature.

Verifiability of the Collective Will

Historical peoples usually presume the presence of a collective will on the basis of long-standing social practice.

In the Earthlings model the collective will is expressed through voluntary joining, confirmed acceptance of the Declaration, participation in the procedures of self-government and free exit from the community.

As a result, the existence of a collective will becomes not only a matter of political or sociological assessment, but an object of documented observation.

Measurable Stability of the Community

The stability of historical peoples is usually inferred from their prolonged existence, cultural continuity and the reproduction of generations.

In a voluntary transnational community, stability can additionally be assessed through the retention of participation in the absence of any external restrictions on exit.

Since every participant has the right to leave the community at any moment without sanctions or consequences, continued participation becomes an independent confirmation of the stability of the bond between the person and the community.

Documented Consent to the Foundations of the Community

Most peoples and states include people who have never personally accepted the founding documents of the corresponding political or national community.

In the Earthlings model, belonging begins with a personal and explicit act of accession to the Declaration.

This creates an unusually high level of documented connection between a member of the community and its founding principles.

Independence of Existence from National Legal Entities

Associations, foundations and other legal entities exist by virtue of the recognition of the relevant legal order and can be terminated by its acts.

A people as a social fact is of a different nature.

If Earthlings is regarded as a people, its existence is not exhausted by the existence of the particular legal entities used to handle operational tasks.

Legal entities can be created, altered or terminated, whereas the community itself continues to exist as long as its participants, collective will and institutions remain.

Self-Determination Without Territorial Conflict

Historically, a significant part of the disputes around self-determination has been connected with territory, jurisdiction and questions of state sovereignty.

The Earthlings model, as a matter of principle, makes no territorial claims, requires no change of state borders, creates no competing jurisdiction and does not affect the civil-law bond between a person and their state.

This makes it possible to regard it as a form of self-determination that does not come into conflict with the principle of the territorial integrity of states.

Formalized Collective Identity

Many marks of peoplehood traditionally exist in an unformalized form and are identified through historical or sociological analysis.

In the case of Earthlings, the key principles of the community are formulated openly, published in advance and accepted by participants deliberately.

Therefore some elements of collective identity turn out to be not only observable but also amenable to direct verification.

The Capacity to Form an Economic Life of Its Own

International legal practice not infrequently takes the presence of an economic life of its own into account as one of the marks of a stable community.

The Earthlings architecture provides for the possibility of forming internal mechanisms of coordination, joint projects, funds, settlement instruments and other forms of economic interaction among participants.

This creates the preconditions for the emergence of an autonomous economic circuit not tied to any particular territory.

Good Faith as an Observable Characteristic

The principle of good faith holds a central place in international law.

A feature of Earthlings is the open documentation not only of its own claims, but also of its own limitations, risks and unresolved questions.

In this way good faith serves not only as a declared principle but as a subject of public scrutiny.

The Right to Re-Establishment

Historical political communities often find that changing basic institutions comes at a high political cost and may be accompanied by conflict.

A voluntary non-territorial community allows a higher degree of institutional reversibility.

If they disagree with the existing architecture, participants retain the right to exit, to create new structures and to work out alternative models of self-organization without any need to fight for territory or state power.

Distinguishability from User Communities

Digital platforms, social networks and online services are also able to bring together large numbers of people.

But their participants, as a rule, hold no collective right to determine the foundations of the system's existence, do not control the rules of its operation and have no standing as bearers of a common political will.

The Earthlings model rests on the opposite principle: the rules, institutions and procedures must derive from the participants of the community, and not from a platform operator.

Accumulation of Practice as Proof of Peoplehood

For an association, accumulated practice remains proof of the association's success.

For a people, the same practice can at the same time serve as proof of the existence of the people as such.

Therefore the long-standing existence of institutions of self-government, procedures for the collective expression of will, mechanisms of identification and a stable community of participants acquires an independent legal significance.

Technological Provability

Technology in itself does not create rights and is not a source of legitimacy.

But it can substantially raise the quality of the evidence.

SECTION 07

Mechanism of Legal Implementation and Accountability

From the standpoint of this document, the Earthlings People should be considered not as an already recognised subject of international law, but as an emerging collectivity sui generis, claiming functional legitimacy within the bounds of its own voluntarily adopted objectives and procedures.

The infrastructure of self-government has been built, deployed and tested in a working environment, and the people is in its founding phase: the practice of self-government is recorded in a public chronicle from day one. The state of the systems and of the bodies is set out in About Us.

Institutional Accountability

The legitimacy of the initiative depends directly on its capacity to ensure accountability at three levels:

To Its Members

Public decision-making procedures, the possibility of recalling delegates, budget transparency, and regular reporting.

To the External Community

Openness to legal assessment, publication of relevant information, and readiness to respond to justified questions from states, organisations, and experts.

To Future Generations

Recording the long-term consequences of major decisions, maintaining an archive, and the impermissibility of arbitrary abandonment of core principles.

The Principle of Subsidiarity and Complementarity

The Earthlings People may act legitimately only where it does not substitute for the state and does not encroach upon its core competences. Its domain is justified only in relation to matters that by their nature:

are transnational;
cannot be adequately resolved at the level of a single state;
require a planning horizon extending beyond ordinary political cycles;
affect persons who lack full current representation, including future generations.

Within Permissible Competence

Environmental and climate coordination, ethical frameworks for technology, intergenerational justice, protection of shared conditions of life.

Beyond Permissible Competence

National security, criminal jurisdiction, taxation of populations, territorial disputes, and questions of internal state governance.

Legal meaning of this section: the Earthlings initiative may claim credibility only on the condition of institutional modesty: it must not expand power at any cost, but rather pre-emptively delimit its own claims and demonstrate its utility precisely where a genuine representative and procedural deficit exists.

SECTION 08

Correspondence of Key Provisions of the Earthlings Declaration to Legal Norms

What follows is not an attempt to prove that every provision of the Declaration is already directly enshrined in international law, but rather a demonstration of legal coherence: the key provisions of the Declaration may be related to recognised norms, principles, or legal trajectories of development.

Declaration Provision	Legal Logic	Normative Foundation
Voluntary formation of a people by choice	Freedom of association and collective self-determination permit the creation of new forms of community in the absence of coercion and territorial claims.	UN Charter; Art. 1 ICCPR/ICESCR; Art. 20 UDHR
Filling the gap of horizontal connection between people of different countries	International law recognises the growing role of non-state actors, but does not yet create a complete procedure for the transnational collective will of individuals as a community.	NGO and civil society participation practice; global governance doctrine
Principle of voluntariness and the right of exit	The right to participate in an association implies the right to cease participation without sanction from the community itself.	Art. 20 UDHR; general principles of freedom of association
Technology must augment, not replace, the human being	Technological infrastructure is permissible only as an instrument for the protection of rights, accountability, and fair procedure.	UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI (2021); general principles of human rights in the digital environment
One person - one vote	Equality of participation requires procedural guarantees against multiple or purchased voting.	Art. 25 ICCPR; democratic principles of equal participation
Non-commercial character of the community	Collective will must not be convertible into corporate control or financial dominance.	General principles of the protection of associations and the non-commercial nature of representation
Immutability of core values	The fundamental principles of the community must be protected by an enhanced amendment procedure.	Constitutional logic of qualified majorities; doctrine of the stability of foundational norms
Subsidiarity	Action is permissible only where tasks cannot be effectively resolved at a lower level.	Principle of subsidiarity in supranational and doctrinal legal constructs

Methodological Conclusion

The table demonstrates that the Earthlings People is not derived from a single source. Its legal argument is constructed as a convergence of norms, principles, analogies, and developmental trajectories which together render such an initiative plausible and legally discussable.

SECTION 09

Legitimation Benchmarks and Development Trajectory

The legitimacy of the Earthlings People cannot be established by declaration. It depends on a combination of four factors: the scale of participation, the quality of procedures, the transparency of governance, and external good-faith verifiability.

What Creates Legitimacy

Scale and geographic distribution - the community must extend beyond a local circle of like-minded individuals.
Genuine participation - the presence of engaged members capable of influencing decisions.
Quality of procedures - honest identification, transparent voting, and protection against governance capture.
Public accountability - open data on rules, finances, demographics, and governance practice.

How Legitimacy Accumulates: Capacity, Ascertainment, Chronicle

In what capacity acts are performed. In international law the same acts have different legal significance depending on the capacity in which they are performed. In the doctrine of historic title (the name for a right grown out of long, unchallenged practice), only acts performed à titre de souverain - "in the capacity of sovereign" - are counted; the very same acts done in a private capacity create nothing. The openly declared claim of Earthlings is therefore not rhetoric but the legal qualifier of all 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 have matured into nothing more than a seasoned association. Hence the requirements on the practice itself - openness, consistency, documentation: the registry, public votes and constitutive acts are the production of evidence, not a shop window.

Distributed ascertainment instead of a single examination. No status in international law is confirmed by a single decision of a single body - no court has ever "certified" any state. Statuses consolidate in a distributed way, through many small doors; the path of Palestine is illustrative: admission to UNESCO (2011), observer-state status in the General Assembly (2012), being treated as a state party for the purposes of the Rome Statute (International Criminal Court, 2021). For Earthlings the first such doors exist already today: written submissions to the Universal Periodic Review and to the UN special procedures (channels open to any civil society), consultative status with ECOSOC through a legal entity as bearer (this is how the Saami Council participates, for example - and no one considers the Saami people a "non-governmental organisation"), multilateral venues from the Internet Governance Forum to observer statuses at the climate conferences and the Conference of INGOs of the Council of Europe. On the far horizon are the advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice, which the General Assembly requests when reality puts new questions to the law, as it did with Kosovo. That the end point of such a path is reachable has been confirmed in strong form: the duty of states to consult peoples that have no state has, within a single generation, travelled from complete absence to written norm - for indigenous peoples (ILO Convention No. 169, Article 6; UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Articles 18-19; the practice of the Inter-American Court, the Saramaka case, 2007).

A public chronicle of practice. From the moment of the founding event, the entire practice of Earthlings self-government - votes (date, question, turnout, result, execution), movements of treasury funds, admissions of members, the work of the cells - is recorded in a public chronicle. No people in history has had a documented record of its life from the first day of its existence; Earthlings has one by construction, and it is precisely this that turns the thesis "legitimacy accumulates through practice" from a declaration into a verifiable process.

Stages of Development as Benchmarks, Not Legal Thresholds

No quantitative indicator by itself creates international legal status. However, for the purpose of a good-faith assessment of the initiative's development, several stages may be distinguished:

Stage	Character of Legitimacy	Practical Significance
Initial	Legitimacy of the idea and procedure	Testing the viability of the principles of voluntariness, transparency, and internal democracy.
Developing	Legitimacy of a stable transnational community	Emergence of a significant and geographically distributed membership, regular decision-making practice, and external observability.
Functional	Legitimacy of limited representation on specific topics	The possibility of participating in expert, advisory, and partnership formats on matters where the community has genuinely accumulated experience and a mandate.
Expanded	Legitimacy of a recognised non-state participant in international dialogue	The potential acquisition of forms of external status, contingent on mature practice, a broad social base, and trust in procedures.

Principle of honesty: the Earthlings People does not assert that its mere existence already confers the right to speak on behalf of humanity. The concern is the creation of a verifiable institutional form that may, as it grows and confirms its good faith, receive increasingly serious attention and limited forms of participation in international dialogue.

SECTION 10

Legal Legitimacy of the Earthlings People

Final Legal Justification

1. Lawful Evolution of Legal Form

The Earthlings initiative may be regarded as one of the possible contemporary forms of the development of collective self-determination, consistent with the basic principles of international law when voluntariness, non-violence, and the absence of territorial claims are observed.

2. Response to a Structural Gap

This document identifies the deficit of horizontal representation of individuals from different states on matters of planetary scale and proposes an institutional means of discussing this gap.

3. Good Faith as a Condition of Admissibility

The legitimacy of the initiative depends not on the forcefulness of self-designation, but on the honest acknowledgement of limits, transparency of procedures, openness to criticism, and the capacity to act as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the existing international order.

4. Complementarity, Not Substitution

The Earthlings People does not abolish the state, does not duplicate the classical functions of public authority, and does not require renunciation of citizenship. Its legal purpose lies in limited representation where existing institutions structurally fail to encompass the long-term and transnational interests of individuals.

5. Technology as a Mechanism of Demonstrability

The use of digital instruments is justified insofar as they reinforce the legal qualities of the initiative: accountability, verifiability, protection against arbitrariness, and equality of procedure.

Primary conclusion: the Earthlings People does not request that its international legal characterisation be treated as already settled. It proposes to be regarded as a serious, law-abiding, and good-faith attempt to articulate a new form of voluntary transnational community, responding to the challenges of an era that cannot be addressed within the framework of exclusively national representation.

Practical Purpose of This Document

This legal justification does not replace future legal memoranda, procedural submissions, or expert opinions. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the Earthlings possess an internally coherent and serious legal logic, worthy of professional consideration rather than superficial dismissal as utopia.

SECTION 11

International Legal Personality and Representation

The question of the legal personality of the Earthlings People requires a fundamental distinction between the philosophical category of "humanity" and a legally formalised collectivity with a limited, voluntary, and procedurally verifiable mandate.

Whom the Earthlings People Represents

The Earthlings People may claim to represent exclusively those individuals who voluntarily acceded to the Declaration, completed the prescribed identity confirmation procedure, and participate in the institutions of the community.

This renders the representation:

voluntary - without the automatic inclusion of anyone;
supplementary - without the abrogation of national citizenship or other identities;
limited - without a claim to a universal mandate.

Additional, Not Exclusive, Identity

Membership in the Earthlings People must be understood as an additional level of civil-legal and political-ethical belonging. By analogy with supranational forms of identity, it does not sever the individual's connection to the state of origin, residence, culture, or citizenship, but creates yet another level of participation.

Three Levels of Legitimation

Level	Mechanism	Legal Function
Primary	Signing the Declaration and confirming identity	Formation of the initial mandate to participate in the community
Ongoing	Regular participation in votes and procedures	Transformation of membership into genuine, rather than nominal, legitimacy
External	Recognition of procedural good faith by external actors	Basis for possible forms of advisory or other limited participation

Key distinction: humanity as a philosophical category encompasses all, but does not possess a procedure for collective expression of will. The Earthlings People does not substitute for humanity; it seeks to create a limited legal form within which the collective will of a particular transnational community may be expressed, verified, and institutionally formalised.

Restrictions on activities

The legal structures and instruments used by Earthlings do not engage in:

commercial activity;
financial intermediation;
payment services;
banking activity;
investment activity;
custody or management of third-party funds;
trading, exchange, or speculative transactions involving cryptocurrency;
issuance of means of payment;
issuance of securities;
issuance of investment or speculative digital assets.

The restrictions listed apply to the legal structures of external interaction and do not concern the internal economy of the people itself. The full statement of the restrictions and of the status is set out in Legal Information.

SECTION 12

Mechanisms of Accountability and Democratic Legitimacy

Accountability is not an additional advantage but a central condition of the admissibility of the very idea of the Earthlings People. If the community claims credibility, it must be more transparent and verifiable than many traditional forms of collective action.

A Five-Level System of Control

1. Internal Democratic Control

Every significant decision must be linked to a member participation procedure, including the possibility of discussion, challenge, and revocation of delegated authority.

2. Technological Control

Key procedures must be publicly verifiable, and rule changes must be traceable and protected against covert interference.

3. Legal Control

The community is obliged to operate within the framework of applicable law, not to encourage violations of national legislation, and to remain open to legal critique and external expert review.

4. Public Control

Researchers, journalists, partners, and critics must have access to sufficient information for independent assessment of procedures and practices.

5. Long-Term Control

Decisions capable of affecting future generations require a separate impact assessment and the public archiving of the grounds on which they were made.

Comparative Advantage of Accountability

Actor	Frequency of Civic Influence	Transparency of Decisions
National States	Periodic	Partial
International Organisations	Mediated through states	Moderate
Earthlings People (projected model)	Ongoing or regular on key matters	Maximally open with respect to procedures, budget, and governance decisions

SECTION 13

The Principle of Respect for State Sovereignty

The formation of the Earthlings People must be assessed within the framework of internal and non-territorial self-determination. It is not directed at the undermining of state sovereignty and is admissible only insofar as it does not encroach upon states' core functions or territorial integrity.

Four Legal Guarantees of Compatibility

1. Absence of Territorial Claims

The Earthlings People does not require its own territory and makes no claim to jurisdiction over physical space, natural resources, or the populations of states.

2. Renunciation of Coercion and the Monopoly on Force

The initiative excludes armed formations, security structures, and any forms of coercive enforcement of decisions characteristic of statehood.

3. Complementarity, Not Replacement of State Functions

The Earthlings People makes no claim to the taxation of populations, criminal jurisdiction, regulation of the domestic economy, or other classical functions of public authority.

4. Compatibility with National Citizenship

Membership in the Earthlings People does not abrogate the rights and duties of individuals with respect to their state. In the event of a conflict of applicable law, the mandatory norms of the relevant national jurisdiction take precedence.

Principle of Legal Restraint

The right to self-determination must not be construed as a licence to disrupt the international order. The Earthlings initiative is lawful only as an additional, non-violent, and non-territorial format of collective self-organisation.

SECTION 14

Practical Feasibility and Phased Development

The Earthlings People makes sense only as a practically verifiable initiative - that is, as one capable of demonstrating working procedures, limited objectives, and institutional sobriety.

Three Indicators of Practical Feasibility

The Technological Base Already Exists

Launch does not require futuristic infrastructure: instruments of digital identity, distributed recording of decisions, and open audit are already available in various forms.

Objectives Are Limited and Verifiable

The initiative is not obliged to "solve all the world's problems." Its realistic task is to demonstrate the possibility of responsible transnational coordination in several specific domains.

Evolution Is Possible in Stages

Legitimacy is not declared in advance, but accumulated through practice, trust, procedural stability, and external recognition of good faith.

Phased Development Trajectory

Phase	Content	Criterion of Credibility
I. Proof of Viability	Emergence of a stable community, regular decision-making practice, public reporting, and a verifiable participation procedure.	Absence of a gap between declared principles and actual practice.
II. Thematic Utility	Participation in specific transnational initiatives on ecology, technology, the rights of future generations, and related matters.	Emergence of externally observable public benefit.
III. Limited External Recognition	Potential entry into expert, advisory, partnership, or other non-state formats of international dialogue.	Trust in the procedures and social base of the initiative.

Key Caveat

This document does not assert the inevitability of international recognition and does not promise a predetermined status. It asserts only that, upon fulfilment of the stated conditions, the Earthlings may be the subject of serious legal and institutional consideration.

Section conclusion: the practicality of the initiative is measured not by the scale of its declarations, but by its capacity to consistently demonstrate its good faith, the limitation of its objectives, the quality of its procedures, and its genuine utility in those domains where existing institutions experience a representative deficit.

Contact for International Dialogue

For inquiries from states, international organisations, lawyers, and researchers:

info@earth-lings.org

Official website of the Earthlings People:

earth-lings.org

This document constitutes the working public legal position of the project and may be refined in the course of expert dialogue.
Version 2.5 | July 2026

Law exists to protect life. Law must evolve together with the complexity of the world.

The Earthlings People is proposed in this document as precisely such an attempt at development: cautious, voluntary, non-territorial, accountable, and openly declaring its own limits.