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 organization but a form of belonging — with verified identity, democratic self-governance, a permanent registry, and a mechanism for collective will-expression. 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.
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 is not accompanied by a commensurate legal mechanism for the collective expression of will at the transnational level.
The point is not that humanity lacks representation entirely — UN member states formally speak on behalf of their citizens. The structural gap lies elsewhere: people lack a mechanism for direct collective participation in planetary issues beyond state mediation. 500 million people are not represented by any state at all.