Sovereign citizen movement

Summary

The sovereign citizen movement (SovCits) is a loose group of anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, vexatious litigants, tax protesters and financial scammers found mainly in English-speaking common law countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Sovereign citizens have a pseudolegal belief system based on misinterpretations of common law, and claim not to be subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them. The movement appeared in the U.S. in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries; the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries. Sovereign citizen ideas have also been incorporated by other fringe movements in the United States and abroad, such as the Reichsbürger in Germany and Austria. The FBI has called sovereign citizens "anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or 'sovereign' from the United States".