The absurdity of ‘sovereign citizens’

IN SINGAPORE, there have been at least three recent legal cases where a defendant has claimed to be a “sovereign citizen”. This would supposedly let them be exempted from abiding by the laws of the land or respecting its courts.

These claims have received short shrift from a legal system that refuses to recognise any such status – with good reason.

The origins of the sovereign citizen idea lie in the Posse Comitatus, a far-right agglomeration of groups founded in the US in the late 1960s. A racist movement that was anti-Black and anti-Semitic, it claimed that Jews controlled and manipulated federal institutions and that only county-level elected government was legitimate.