This page sets out the legal position of the people in condensed form - for state authorities, financial institutions, partners, and lawyers.
Stage. The Earthlings people is constituted by the adoption of the Declaration; the founding period runs from 22 November 2026 until the Declaration is adopted. The passport registry contract, identity verification, Cells, and the accounting of the internal economy are deployed and working; the public voting channel is deployed, but no substantive votes have yet been held in it, there is no tool for secret voting yet, and the founding vote will be held openly, and the Treasury smart contracts have not been deployed (the document "Where We Are Now"). The infrastructure begins to fill with practice as the number of participants grows. What is set out below describes the legal scheme and its limits, not a scale that has been reached.
The Earthlings people is a voluntarily self-organized non-territorial community based on free identification, equal participation, and collective self-government.
It is not identified with any state, territory, legal entity, commercial structure, or particular jurisdiction.
The source of legitimacy is the free choice of the participants themselves, confirmed personally by each of them. It is derived from no legal structure, no state, and no permission: structures may be established and wound up without affecting the existence of the community.
Legal grounds and their limits
The Earthlings people relies on two norms of international law in force:
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 on Human Rights;
the right of peoples to self-determination - common Article 1 of the 1966 Covenants; as a principle it is enshrined in the UN Charter, Article 1(2).
Both norms are in force. The 1966 Covenants and the European Convention are binding on the states parties to them; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by General Assembly resolution A/RES/217(III)A and has no binding force of its own, but its provisions have passed into treaties and into the practice of states.
What is not settled. Freedom of association protects the founding act: people are entitled to associate and to declare what they consider themselves to be. It does not confer a status on the result. Whether a voluntarily founded non-territorial community is a people within the meaning of international law is a question the law has not decided, and we do not pass it off as decided. The objections to our position are set out in our own documents at full strength and without softening: Legal Basis, Objections and Answers.
The existence of the Earthlings people is not made dependent on an act of recognition: no procedure exists by which a voluntary non-territorial community could be recognized as a people, and there is no general register of peoples. The existing procedures - the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, national procedures for recognizing indigenous peoples - rest either on territory or on the domestic law of a particular state, and a community of our kind can go through none of them. What the people seeks is legal visibility - being treated as a people where specific questions arise: at venues, in consultations, in proceedings. Visibility accumulates through practice, time, the number of participants, and legal work. Today it is at the beginning of that path, and the people creates no rights in international law as yet.
Legal interfaces for external engagement
For engagement with the existing legal, administrative, and financial infrastructure, registered legal structures in one or more jurisdictions are used - foundations, associations, and other organizational forms.
The first such instrument was registered in April 2026. Its registration particulars are provided on a reasoned request from state authorities, financial institutions, and partners.
Such structures are solely operational and replaceable means of external engagement:
they do not embody the people;
they hold no power and exercise no authority over the people;
they do not determine its existence;
they are not the source of its legitimacy;
they may be established, replaced, and wound up without affecting the existence, continuity, and identity of the people.
After the Declaration is adopted, the persons acting through these structures act by decision of the DAO Assembly and within its limits; before it is adopted there is no people, and no one acts on its behalf. Where a deadline is shorter than any vote, the Assembly issues a protective legal mandate in advance (Earthlings Charter, Article 33): it is revocable at any time by a simple majority, creates no office, gives no exclusive right to act on behalf of the people, and is limited to an exhaustive list of permitted actions. Decisions on behalf of the people are taken only by the Assembly.
Limits on the activity of the legal structures
The legal structures used for external engagement provide no services of the following kinds to third parties and carry on no such activities:
commercial activity for profit (the contribution pays for identity verification and the issue of the passport - Terms of Use, section 11);
financial intermediation;
payment services;
banking activity;
investment activity and fiduciary management of property;
custody or management of third-party funds;
trading, exchange, and speculative operations in digital assets in the interests of third parties;
the issuance of means of payment;
the issuance of securities;
the issuance of investment or speculative digital assets.
Where the line runs
What matters is not that the structures are inactive, but in whose interests and with whose funds they act.
The Treasury disposes of common funds - participants' contributions, transfers from Cells, donations - after the Declaration is adopted, by decisions of the DAO Assembly, with operations publicly recorded. They are not funds of third parties: no one holds a share in them, the contribution pays for identity verification and the issue of the passport, and when it is refunded is set out in the Terms of Use (section 11). Before the Declaration is adopted there is no people, and the founder disposes of the funds with public reporting (the document "Where We Are Now"); for operations in fiat currency an instrument legal entity is used, which is an independent taxpayer in its own jurisdiction.
Holding funds in various forms, including stablecoins, and moving between them serve one purpose only: sufficient funds for current expenses and resilience to exchange-rate fluctuations. The Treasury does not generate income from operations with assets, does not manage other people's funds, does not raise investment, and is neither an asset-management fund nor an investment intermediary.
The people's internal unit of account is traded nowhere, is not listed on exchanges, and is not being prepared for listing; it has not been issued on-chain - credits are kept in the platform's internal accounting - does not circulate, and gives no votes whatever the balance held.
The people runs its own economic affairs for itself; it does not provide financial services to anyone.
What the Earthlings people is not
The Earthlings people is not a state, a supranational organization, a financial institution, or a jurisdiction.
It claims no sovereignty, no monopoly on coercion, and no exercise of the functions of public authority in any state, and it does not exercise the right to self-determination by separating territory, altering state borders, or limiting the sovereignty of any state (Declaration, Article 7).
Participants' citizenship, their tax obligations, and the jurisdiction to which they are subject are not affected. Where applicable laws conflict, the mandatory norms of the relevant national jurisdiction prevail.
The people speaks only on behalf of those who voluntarily entered it and claims no representation of humanity.
Governance
Governance is exercised directly by the participants through mechanisms of collective self-government: the DAO Assembly is the sole body that takes binding decisions. Technical and protective structures act under an immediately revocable mandate and take no decisions on behalf of the people. The Charter enters into force with the adoption of the Declaration (Charter, Article 38); until then there is no DAO Assembly, no Core Nodes, no Emergency Multisig, and no Independent Council, and the only discretionary power of the founding period with regard to the texts is the decision of the author of the Declaration to include proposals in the text (the document "The Founding Period").
Rights in the texts
The texts of the corpus are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0): they may be copied, distributed, translated and adapted, including for commercial purposes, provided the author is credited and the licence is linked. The code of the passport smart contract with its architectural documentation, and the corpus build tools, are published under the MIT licence; what is closed and why is set out in the document "Where We Are Now".
This is not a gesture of openness but a consequence of design. A people whose founding texts cannot be reproduced can neither be verified nor restored if the existing infrastructure is captured or ceases to work. The right to reproduce is part of the protection against capture, not an addition to it.
