Understanding the national security risks and harms

Sovereign citizens are often dismissed as eccentrics, perhaps agitators, and except in rare circumstances, not fundamentally dangerous. The sovereign citizen movement is not a proscribed movement in most countries, although the German Ministry of the Interior has banned two associations related to the Reichsbürger movement.

It is not considered illegal to identify as a sovereign citizen or believe in the movement’s ideology and conspiracies. However, many sovereign citizens have been arrested and convicted of a variety of increasingly serious and violent offences.

Yet most individuals who claim to be sovereign citizens are not violent and join the movement to avoid paying taxes, or otherwise escape legal obligations. Most of the movement’s influencers are scammers who seek to exploit vulnerable people by conducting fee-paying seminars on how to evade debts and taxes. These influencers often sell fictious financial instruments such as fake certificates of deposit, counterfeit Treasury cheques and money orders, and fraudulent diplomatic identification cards they claim can be used to pay off mortgages and other debts or exempt them from paying taxes.

However, the view that sovereign citizens are mostly a nuisance is becoming increasingly outdated. Some of the movement’s scams have resulted in significant financial criminal activity.

Particularly in the United States, the movement has also been associated with violence, presenting a serious threat to law enforcement. That violence is now spreading to other countries and jurisdictions, creating national security risks.

The sovereign citizen movement presents three broad and escalating national security threats: radicalisation to violence; terrorism, civil unrest, and plotting to overthrow government; and delegitimation of the state.

Radicalisation to violence

The core claims made by sovereign citizens — that they are immune from law and that governments are not legitimate sources of authority — can and have motivated serious acts of violence. A recent survey of Australians found that people who espouse anti-government conspiratorial beliefs, such as sovereign citizen beliefs, were more likely to support violence and have engaged in violence in the past.

Most acts of violence perpetrated by sovereign citizens have been spontaneous or reactive. These acts have tended to occur during encounters with police or other public-facing government employees, particularly in relation to traffic stops, welfare checks, or the enforcement of ordinances or collection of fines.

Sovereign citizens view police as agents of illegitimate governments. When they defy police orders, sovereign citizens believe “they are legitimately resisting the tyranny of state control, and defending their inherent rights and freedoms”.

The shooting of two Australian police officers in regional Victoria in August 2025 and many more attacks against police in the United States illustrate how encounters between sovereign citizens and law enforcement can turn deadly. Dutch sovereign citizens belonging to the Common Law Netherlands Earth group, who advocate “fighting back” against the government and law enforcement, have been convicted of threatening police and tried for illegal weapons possession.

In Germany in 2016, members of the Reichsbürger movement launched attacks from their own property in two separate incidents, killing law enforcement officials. In 2022, there were other Reichsbürger attacks on police, one during an attempted weapons seizure and another at a police checkpoint.

The judiciary is another frequent target of sovereign citizens. In addition to tying up significant court resources, judges and court officers are often the target of intimidation and threats of violence. In Victoria, threats against the judiciary nearly quadrupled between 2023 and 2025, and almost a quarter of judges in New South Wales have received death threats, many from sovereign citizens.

Desmond Filby, also known as Dezi Freeman, the Australian sovereign citizen responsible for the recent fatal shootings of two police officers in Victoria, previously tried to arrest a magistrate during a court hearing.

Sovereign citizens also present a threat to local councils and councillors. Local councils are the most accessible form of government, one with which citizens have the most interaction, yet these institutions do not receive the same level of resourcing or protection as state or national agencies and officials. In Australia and the United States, local councils have had to call police or deploy security for meetings, with councillors reporting feeling increasingly threatened.

In a New Zealand incident in 2022, a sovereign citizen “sheriff” entered a local council building and assaulted a staff member after having previously threatened others.

Terrorism, civil unrest, and plotting

While sovereign citizens have generally not engaged in premeditated mass casualty attacks in furtherance of their ideology, there have been incidents of sovereign citizens instigating civil unrest and engaging in terrorist attacks, plots, and acts of violence directed towards government officials. The majority of sovereign citizen violence has been perpetrated in the United States, with the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack ever committed in America being the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government extremist whose co-conspirator Terry Nichols identified with sovereign citizen ideology.

Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building in Texas in a 2010 suicide attack, was an anti-tax protester and is also considered to be associated with the sovereign citizen movement.

Based on these previous acts of violence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has deemed sovereign citizen extremists as domestic terrorists (though at the time, Stack’s attack was controversially not labelled as a terrorist incident by the government.)

A more recent example of the threat to national security posed by sovereign citizen and convergent movements sits outside the United States. The largest counter-terrorism operation in German history took place in 2022, targeting adherents of the Reichsbürger movement for an alleged plot to overthrow the German government by raiding the Bundestag and taking elected officials hostage. The raid spanned numerous properties across Germany and Austria; 25 people were arrested including a former member of the Bundestag, a judge, former members of the armed forces, and a police inspector. Since then, there have been other arrests of German sovereign citizens for attempting to create a terrorist organisation, plotting and committing further attacks, and the killing of a police officer by a suspected sovereign citizen.

In 2024, sovereign citizens in the Netherlands were accused of plotting a terrorist attack on the mayor of Deventer and had already purchased firearms to support their citizen arrests and tribunals.

Globally, sovereign citizens were also active in many instances of civil unrest in response to pandemic restrictions and public health measures, including the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 after the US elections.

Sovereign citizens participated in violent protests and storming of legislatures around the world, including in Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. In the United Kingdom, sovereign citizens used pseudo-legal arguments to challenge vaccine mandates, accusing the government of “vaccine genocide”. They attempted to arrest public health officials as “common law constables” and mobilised supporters by offering training for direct action.

Sovereign citizen ideology promotes a radical reframing of the relationship between citizen and state, portraying the citizen as enslaved to the state, and the state as tyrannical and illegitimate.

These ideas are based on pseudo-legal and pseudo-historical beliefs that not only fundamentally reject government authority but claim it is a threat. When authority is framed in such terms, justifying violence against it or plotting to overthrow it is not an illogical next step.

Delegitimation of the state

Sovereign citizens not only reject government authority and legitimacy; they create alternative systems and fictitious entities of authority. The creation of “micronations”, where citizens claim swaths of land and property as “sovereign”, is one such example. Here, they form communes, forge their own identity documents and sometimes currency, set regulations, and charge fees to those living there. Their leaders often fashion themselves as royalty. German sovereign citizen Peter Fitzek, like Romana Didulo in Canada, has crowned himself king of Germany, his realm a cluster of properties in Wittenburg. Here, he has held his own coronation, prints his own passports, and mints his own coins. Hundreds of people have paid to live and work there, learning how to separate themselves from the state.

Sovereign citizens have also set up similar enclaves in other countries. For example, Germans associated with the Reichsbürger movement have bought land in Paraguay to establish settlements.

Micronations have cropped up around the world, but nowhere more so than Australia. Authorities have tended to tolerate the Australian variants as odd expressions of Australian larrikinism or as creative attempts at protest or to resist bureaucracy.

Well known examples include the Principality of Hutt River, which was born out of a dispute between its creator and the Western Australian government over wheat production quotas.

These Australian micronations have not generally presented a national security threat, but they do represent the delegitimation of government authority.

The national security threat escalates, however, when sovereign citizens create so-called “fictitious entities” to support these micronations or attempt to use claims of sovereignty to plot against the government, as the Reichsbürger movement has done in Germany. Fictitious entities are bogus government agencies, law enforcement, consulates, and courts created by sovereign citizens.

Representatives from these entities often attempt to arrest and try in court legitimate government officials and police. For example, in Ontario, Canada, sovereign citizen “sheriffs” associated with Didulo attempted to arrest police officers and try them for “crimes against humanity”.

There have been a number of similar incidents in Australia and Europe. In 2021, a disparate group of Australians with sovereign citizen links was arrested after they gathered online, claiming to be commissioners of a new Australian federal police force and promising to carry out arrest warrants against government officials.

Earlier in the year, members of a Western Australian sovereign group broke into and took residence in a courthouse, attempting to establish themselves as the “proper governing body of law”.

Another sovereign citizen group in Western Australia has sworn themselves in as sheriffs and established courts. In 2022, they conducted their own jury trial and “convicted” former prime minister Scott Morrison and every state premier for their involvement in the Covid response, sentencing them to 30 years’ imprisonment.

Throughout the pandemic, and after, there were scores of people, motivated by sovereign citizen beliefs and other conspiracies, arrested for attempting to kidnap or kill elected officials and high office holders around the world.