An Address to Everyone

Peoples are admitted to the UN as guests: they are heard, they are consulted, but the voting happens without them.

The UN Charter opens with the words "We the peoples of the United Nations". Yet in all the years of its existence, no word spoken by peoples has by itself decided anything. States decide, not peoples. And the interests of a state and the interests of a people diverge more often than it is customary to say out loud.

Decisions are taken in a few offices, and the consequences fall on millions of people. We pay bills that were drawn up without our consent. And states are not coping with their tasks - not because they are bad, but because this work cannot be done in full without a constructive civil society. States need a counterpart, and today none exists.

Every people that exists is tied to states through citizenship and through the territory where it lives. Not one people has a voice of its own.

Legal systems worked out a protection against error and abuse of power long ago - checks and balances. The task was set correctly, but the construction works badly. A check can be bought, a balance can be intimidated, and this happens not in exceptional cases but constantly. All the checks and balances sit inside the very state system they are meant to examine. That same state system creates them, appoints them and pays for them.

At the international level there is not even that.

The UN Charter knows no procedure for removing the Secretary-General - none exists at all. The UN's oversight services answer to the UN itself. It cannot be taken to court: only states may be parties before the International Court of Justice.

How can the world be sure that the Secretary-General has not been bought or intimidated by some state? It cannot. There is no way to check.

A real check is possible only from a place that no budget, no appointment and no permit can reach. No such place exists today. We are building it.

Our initiative is to create a non-territorial people. For everyone ready to take part in building a society of a new kind.

This will be the first people that belongs to no state and claims no territory. A people that determines its own fate and expresses its own will. In which people share common values and acknowledge a common belonging. A people you can enter by your own considered choice. A people you can leave at any time without explaining why. In which no one can accumulate power over others, and which rests on cooperation rather than competition. All the while a person remains a citizen of their country and keeps their nationality, religion and culture, but gains what they never had - a society of a new kind.

We named this people Earthlings, because all of us are bound to the planet we live on.

A question arises: why can such a people be created at all?

Because people may gather into a people without asking anyone's permission. Into a people tied to no territory, no state, no descent, no language and no culture. For a fuller understanding of this question, read the documents "Legal Basis", "Civic Voice", "How a Subject of Law Arises" and "Objections and Answers".

It is a people, precisely, that international law recognizes as the bearer of the right to self-determination - the right to determine its own development and to speak in its own name. Neither a nation, nor an ethnic group, nor a population is endowed with that right.

A people can be founded by people without state registration. For any public movement or association such registration is compulsory, and they can be shut down by a decision from outside. A people cannot be shut down; it exists as long as its people exist. Its existence requires no one's recognition beyond the recognition of the people themselves.

A people can be founded only when it is known who belongs to it and when votes can be honestly counted. As long as people lived far apart and could not verify one another, neither was possible. Any list of participants could be filled with invented names, and one person could enter it many times. Nor was there any way to verify the outcome of a vote.

Today this is solved. A person confirms that they are alive and singular without revealing who they are. The vote belongs to them alone: it cannot be bought or accumulated. The course and the outcome of any vote are open - anyone can satisfy themselves of it without taking a word on trust. All the activity of the people is open to inspection as well.

That is why such a people could not have arisen a hundred years ago, or twenty.

Many watch over power: the press, human rights defenders, election observers. They do necessary work, and all of them share one vulnerability. They can be stripped of funding, have their accreditation withdrawn, be refused registration, be expelled from the country. An examiner who can be switched off is not a reliable check.

The Earthlings people cannot be switched off. It is registered in no country, receives money from no budget, has no office that can be closed and no permit that can be revoked. For the first time, examination is carried out in such a way that the examined can neither influence the examiner nor control them.

We cannot and will not hold anyone to account: we have no such mandate. The strength of an external check lies in making visible what someone is trying to hide. This is how auditors work, and election observers. We can set what was said against what was done and speak of the discrepancy so that it becomes plain to everyone.

This is not a struggle against power. An auditor does not struggle against a bank; an observer does not struggle against an electoral commission. External oversight is needed by power itself: it is the only way to prove that power is clean, when its own examiners sit on its own budget.

The question we asked about the UN we are bound to ask about ourselves.

A voice in the Earthlings people cannot be bought, accumulated or taken away. The register of participants is not under the control of a single operator. Every decision can be verified by anyone. And the five principles that protect the person from the power of the people itself cannot be repealed by a majority, by the Earthlings Charter, or by interpretation.

To that question we have an answer. The UN has none.

Free and thinking people can together build a second civic system, one able to coexist peacefully with the one that already exists. Then every person will have a choice of which society to live in. A people that proves itself workable in practice will have every ground to become a full subject of international law.

Published on this site are the documents on why this is needed, how it is arranged, what justifies it in law, and what it gives to every person and to those who come after us.

Begin by reading the Earthlings Declaration.