During the pandemic, Alia’s* former partner started sending “long-winded rants” via text message. Covid-19 wasn’t real. Stay-at-home rules were unlawful, he told her, and he took their children to anti-lockdown protests. He started to share what she later realised were “sovereign citizen” or pseudolaw ideas.
“He wouldn’t follow anything that the government was saying because ‘it’s not a genuine law, it’s illegal, it’s treason, and it’s all a scam that’s designed to try to bring in the new world order’,” she said.
As the virus spread, they were in the midst of proceedings in the family court over child custody. Alia said she tried to raise his behaviour with the court and other authorities, but felt like it wasn’t taken seriously.
“It was brushed off as, ‘people have different beliefs and people have different political leanings’,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t clearly get across that this was going so much deeper than a different political leaning. That this was potentially putting the kids at risk.”
The impact of sovereign citizen pseudolaw movements – where adherents use “legal argumentation” that has no legal basis, often predicated on a belief in the illegality of or corruption of government – are having a serious impact on the family court.
In 2024, Guardian Australia has tracked almost a dozen family court judgments where these kinds of arguments had an impact on proceedings.
“It’s really an emerging area in the family law jurisdiction that needs to be addressed seriously … given what’s at stake with children involved in these cases,” said Dr Georgina Dimopoulos, an associate professor of law at Southern Cross University.
The issue is also affecting criminal cases involving children. At least two women have been convicted this year of offences related to unlawfully removing children in cases linked to sovereign citizen groups or pseudolaw ideas.
Pseudolaw ideology on the rise since pandemic
Guardian Australia has spoken to several family court and independent children’s lawyers who say fringe legal movements are on the rise in Australia. Pseudolaw ideas about children and the court are shared openly in groups on the messaging app Telegram, and taught in online Zoom sessions. A common thread is the claim that children are property.
In one family court case heard in Hobart, a man announced himself to be a “sovereign citizen” in court and refused to participate in the trial, delivering a speech from the public gallery “indicative of the husband not accepting the jurisdiction of this court and also indicative of the husband maintaining apparent ‘possessory’ rights in respect of his children”.
Another father challenged the jurisdiction of the court in Cairns and used “sovereign citizen terminology” often deployed by pseudolaw litigants, such as asking for proof of the court’s authority over a “living man”. He also considered his children to be his property.
A spokesperson for the federal circuit and family court of Australia said it did not collect data on the frequency of “sovereign citizen” involvement, but “anecdotal evidence points to an increase in instances in recent years, especially following the Covid pandemic and increased access to online resources”.
“Sovereign citizens occupy a significant amount of time and resources involving both judicial officers and court staff,” the spokesperson said. “While the courts are well equipped to handle sovereign citizens, it’s regrettable that this places greater cost on the system as a whole.”
James Maxwell is a principal lawyer with Coulter Legal in Victoria. He said that during 2020 he noted an uptick in cases where vaccines had led to disputes between parents. The court’s obligation is to make orders in the best interest of the children, so if a parent was imposing beliefs contrary to medical advice, the court would often take a dim view.
There was a similar approach when he acted opposite a man who was opposed to the jurisdiction of the courts and the legitimacy of the family law system. He would refuse to sign correspondence with his name and instead used a fingerprint. “My client was able to secure some very positive parenting orders,” he recalled.
“It’s something that’s generally viewed as a destructive or obstructive ideology,” Maxwell said of pseudolaw arguments in the family court. “It’s very rare that the people who are cloaking themselves in those ideas are coming to the table with positive proposals.”
Marlene Ebejer, principal lawyer with Ebejer and Associates Lawyers, acted in a family court property matter several years ago where one of the parties tried these tactics. “He would write to everybody saying how he was a sovereign citizen and the laws of this country don’t apply to him,” she said.
He included everybody: “A federal circuit court judge, judges in WA, judges in the family court of Australia, the lord mayor of Melbourne, the Legal Services Board, real estate agents, supreme court appeals registry.”
In her case, it wasn’t only that his behaviour slowed down the court’s process, he also created additional costs. “They’re just constantly writing, writing, writing, writing to the lawyers,” Ebejer said. “The lawyers have to deal with that [and] there’s charges…There’s a cost implication on having to adjourn hearings all the time.”
Dylan Burch, a principal with Aitkin Partners, said he had also seen an increase in pseudolaw arguments. In his experience, “the sovereign citizen party” does attend court but does not actively participate in proceedings, often dragging things out to a final hearing.
“Ultimately, it has had to be left to the court to make final orders to alter property interests and to divide the assets,” he said. “These are unfortunate circumstances because it only increases costs of the party wanting to engage with the court process and resolve matters.”
Family law litigants that self-represent, often due to cost and in some cases mistrust of the legal system, are a long-term challenge for the court which must balance the need to guide litigants about proper court process with efficiency.
Those using pseudolaw arguments add a new hurdle. “My view is that they’re adding to the challenges that the courts are already experiencing with the growth in self-represented litigants,” Dimopoulos said.
The risk of abduction and other crimes
In August, a woman given the name “Kirsten” was convicted in Wollongong district court after taking her eight-year-old child from a care worker.
She put the child into a rented van and handed the care worker a “statement and notice” with her thumb print “for identification”, which asserted she was “a living being sovereign to this land”. Once in court, she said she would only answer to the name “Kirsten a living woman”.
Kirsten was also charged with contempt for her behaviour during the trial, which included repeatedly talking over witnesses and the judge. She insulted the judge, calling him a “talking parrot” and “master propagandist”, according to the judgment, and asked “improper and disallowable questions” of witnesses including her teenage son.
“She was fit to be tried,” the judge, AC Haesler SC, wrote. “Her actions were deliberate and considered. She was, in all respects, ‘the maker of her own misfortune’.”
The risk of abduction is cited in a number of 2024 family court cases. One man who had used pseudolaw rhetoric drove away with his children and did not return them for seven days until a recovery order was executed, according to a court decision delivered in Cairns.
In 2023, researcher Dr Christine Sarteschi published an article on an increasing overlap between “sovereign citizen” concepts, QAnon and child protection cases in North America.
In one Telegram group she examined, “children are property” was a common theme and taking a child from a home was viewed as theft. “[Child protective services] and family court are both corporations and thus are nonexistent,” was another view. “CPS targets single parents who are easy marks, and takes children against their will for human sex trafficking.”
Similar language has found some purchase here. In another case, a mother appealed against orders that the father have sole parental responsibility after she refused to return their two children, citing “organised crime had infiltrated the Brisbane federal court and was responsible for human child trafficking and financial fraud”, among dozens of other claims.
Earlier this year, the ABC reported that one sovereign citizen group was using a bogus court to harass judges, parents and other parents involved in custody battles.
“These beliefs are also very dangerous in the sense that they are spreading amongst self-represented litigants and parents, particularly in these highly emotionally charged, complex disputes,” Dimopoulos said. “It can actually be quite dangerous if these unfounded or baseless ideologies are spreading amongst people who are already in quite a desperate situation.”
For Alia, the scariest moment came after the Wiembilla shooting in December 2022, when Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train shot and killed two police officers and a neighbour. Police said the incident was “a religiously motivated terrorist attack”, but the trio were also fixated on several conspiracy theories about police and the government.
“It was hitting a bit too close to home,” she said. “I felt like it was an example of how far this belief system can go… Now we’re a few years post final orders, and life is still hell sometimes because the system has pretty much let us down.”
*Name has been changed to protect privacy
