After one of the largest police operations in modern Australian history, fugitive Dezi Freeman, wanted for the killing of two police officers, was tracked down and shot dead by police after a three-hour confrontation in rural Victoria. The seven-month search to find Freeman and bring him to justice captured the nation’s attention. Freeman called himself a sovereign citizen, having changed his name from Filby and gaining some earlier notoriety for his outspoken views and confrontations with authority during the Covid pandemic. But the global attention on one manhunt obscures the broader challenge the sovereign citizen movement poses to democracy and the rule of law.
Freeman’s beliefs stemmed from an anti-authority movement originating from the United States that now has many manifestations around the world, including Australia. The sovereign citizen movement is a collective rejection of the legitimacy of government authority and the democratic rule of law. Sovereign citizens do not believe they are subject to the same laws as everyone else and have formulated a fantastical conspiracy and pseudo-legal framework to justify this belief.
The movement was fairly fringe, with limited involvement in violence outside the United States, until the Covid-19 pandemic. The accompanying restrictions and lockdowns were a catalyst for the growth of the movement and the escalating risks it posed.
For many citizens living in democracies, the pandemic was the first time they felt the full weight of government authority when they were constrained by emergency powers and public health measures. While these measures may have been necessary to preserve public health, they also had many negative social, psychological, and economic impacts. For a subset of people, the pandemic drove them to sovereign citizen ideas and narratives that gave them a framework for opposing the state.
Not all sovereign citizens are violent, but instances of violent acts and other illegal behaviour have grown. Violent confrontations with law enforcement have increased, like Freeman’s confrontation during his attempted arrest at the small Victorian town of Porepunkah last year. Many sovereign citizens were involved in and led instances of civil unrest, including violent anti-lockdown protests and violent threats towards elected and government officials. Sovereign citizens have stormed parliaments, participating in the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol, and in Germany in December 2022, prompting a massive counterterrorism operation in the country’s history over a sprawling coup plot by members of the Reichsbürger movement.
The sovereign citizen movement is also a threat to democratic legitimacy. Sovereign citizens disrupt judicial systems and promote conspiracy theories that undermine trust in democratic institutions. The movement challenges the very foundations of democratic governance. A functioning democratic society based on the rule of law is threatened when a portion of the population believe that rules and laws don’t apply to them.
The question is what to do about it?
The sovereign citizen movement could be proscribed as a terrorist or extremist organisation, as it is in Germany. But many countries’ current legal frameworks, including Australia’s, would not support proscribing it as such. It would be difficult to designate the movement as a terrorist organisation in Australia, as it likely would not meet the threshold and lacks the organisational structure required for designation. It is not a cohesive organisation with distinct leadership and membership. It is not illegal in a democracy to hold anti-government views.
The sovereign citizen movement would also not fall within the new extremist group designation legislated under the 2026 Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill, which establishes a listing scheme for prohibited “hate groups”.
Sovereign citizens fall in a tricky space where counterterrorism and countering extremism laws won’t quite reach them. This also limits the ability of countering extremism intervention programs – which seek to address psychosocial vulnerabilities that drive people towards extremism and radicalisation – to apply to sovereign citizens.
Global coordination also matters as many advanced Western democracies are facing a similar challenge.
Governments need to shift from treating these cases as individual nuisances or threats towards more systematic responses. That starts at the preventative level by focusing on civics and legal literacy. It also requires broader socio-economic policies and community support programs that get at the root cause of alienation and disaffection and increase community resilience and social capital.
Better monitoring of sovereign citizen adherents and influencers is needed to understand the scope of the movement. The extent and number of people who consider themselves to be sovereign citizens are not known – or how many have a propensity to commit violence. More research is needed to understand whether the threat assessment tools developed for other types of violent extremist offenders can also successfully assess sovereign citizens, or if developing alternative methods is necessary.
Targeted intervention is also needed. Sovereign citizens, already wary of authority and government, will be difficult to reach. But mandating participation in a counter extremism intervention or diversion program as part of sentencing when they commit criminal acts or intimidate and harass judges and local officials, or installing penalties coupled with mandated education for frivolous court filings, could be a path forward.
Each country with its own sovereign citizen manifestation will have its own unique legal and political tools and constraints, but global coordination also matters as many advanced Western democracies are facing a similar challenge.
Lydia Khalil and Keiran Hardy last month published a Lowy Institute Policy Brief “The global sovereign citizen movement”.
