Sovereign citizens believe they are exempt from the laws of New Zealand. But that doesn’t stop the law from coming after them.
Another hiccup for New Zealand’s court processes – and this one’s a strange one.
In early February,a couple in Raglan was fined $20,000 for unconsented works to their house, following a long court case in which they claimed to be exempt from council rules.
A few days later, at the other end of the country, a man accused of stealing equipment from a rescue helicopter appeared in the Dunedin District Court, arguing that the judge did not have jurisdiction over him. The judge told him: “I’m starting to think you might be wasting my time.”
It is an increasingly common story of so-called sovereign citizens – or “SovCits” – whose legal arguments are based on a fringe belief system that says they are not subject to New Zealand laws.
“It’s just a waste of time for the most part, because if you think about it, a court or a government agency, if they get a request, it doesn’t really matter how absurd it is, they still have to deal with it,” says Charlie Mitchell, a journalist at The Press who started covering conspiracy theories during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I don’t think we’ve reached the point where this is having a material impact on the courts necessarily, but it is clear that these sorts of arguments are more common.”
The phrase “sovereign citizen” refers to people who are anti-government and believe that they are not bound by the laws of the country where they live.
“I think probably the easiest way to understand it is that they are underpinned by this concept called pseudo-law, and pseudo-law is a parallel legal system that sort of vaguely resembles the real legal system but it doesn’t have the legal validity,” says Mitchell.
“So pseudo-law can sound plausible to the lay person, it will cite statutes and it will reference the common law and things like that, but as soon as it comes into contact with the real legal system, it dissolves.”
“A common thread you’ll find in the SovCit world is citation of these kind of obscure or arcane legal theories that really just do not have any relevance in modern society.”
Over the past few years, these stories have been popping up in the headlines.
In Thames, a case involving a woolshed converted into a house without consent is before the courts; a man cited the Bible and Shakespeare in his efforts to have himself and his five children declared dead; and another man driving without registration or a licence claimed in court that as a “living man” he was free from New Zealand’s legal system.
Many of these stories involve petty infringements. But some are more serious.
“I think it’s fair to say that most of this is just rhetoric online, but you can never discount that this rhetoric could make its way into the real world,” says Mitchell.
And we do have examples of that happening in New Zealand.
“I’ve reported previously on a sovereign citizen who snuck into a council building and assaulted a staff member, seemingly over Covid policies.”
Another stark example was a year ago, when former Nelson mayor Rachel Reese came home to find a stranger in her house. He “launched” himself at her, yelling “why are you in my house, this is my house – it’s been decreed this is my house”. He was citing the Magna Carta – a common tactic of sovereign citizens.
Former Nelson mayor Rachel Reese. Photo / Tracy Neal
The movement has crossover with other far-right movements, including Q-Anon. Byron Clark, an independent researcher looking into conspiracy theories and the far-right, says the movement seemed to pick up steam during the pandemic.
“I noticed sovereign citizen ideas really being adopted by more people during the pandemic as people were looking for a way to try to opt out of the public health measures that were being introduced.
“Also people were spending a lot more time online, going down some conspiracy theory rabbit holes, and these different ideas were cross-pollinating with each other.”
Clark wrote a book called Fear: New Zealand’s hostile underworld of extremists, which included a chapter about the sovereign citizen movement.
“We have one sovereign citizen going through the courts at the moment, Richard Sivell, who is charged with threatening to kill former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and also with sharing objectionable material, particularly the livestream footage of the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019,” says Clark.
“He has been using sovereign citizen arguments in court. So he is somebody who not just engaged in paper terrorism, but making these more violent threats and sharing what is classified as terrorist material.”
In the United States, the FBI has recognised sovereign citizens as a domestic terror threat for 15 years. The New South Wales police have done the same for about a decade, and here, a 2021 report from the police and intelligence community said that sovereign citizens present a “realistically possibility” of committing extremist violence.
But navigating the line between petty “paper terrorism” and a threat to security can be complicated.
“I don’t think we should necessarily think of them all as the same group. I think for some of them they might not even self-identify as sovereign citizens yet,” says Clark.
“They’ll adopt some of these ideas like ‘well here’s the legal loophole that you need to exploit to not register your dog’ or whatever, and that’s quite different than people who have decided they are going to be completely independent from the state and they have found a pseudo-legal framework that will allow them to do that.
“I do think we should be aware though that these two different groups and sort of everyone in between are likely to be communicating with each other in the same online spaces and that’s something we should be aware of, the potential of people who are deeper into this world to radicalise those who are perhaps just starting to get interested or just looking for legal loopholes and trying this out.”
The Detail is a daily news podcast produced for RNZ by Newsroom and is published on NZ Herald with permission. Click on this link to subscribe to the podcast.
- RNZ
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