The right to self-determination is enshrined in the UN Charter, which has been ratified by 190 countries, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which has been ratified by over 175 countries. In other words, nearly every nation on Earth has formally committed to recognizing this right. It is not obscure. It is not contested in principle. It is one of the foundational pillars of the modern human rights framework.
And yet, it is the most consistently suppressed human right in the world.
Every person who believes in human rights should be paying attention to this. Western governments, in particular, have made a habit of positioning themselves as the guardians of human rights. They issue reports. They hold summits. They levy sanctions. They lecture. But there is one right they have never been willing to apply consistently, and that is the right of people to determine how they are governed.
Consider the movements that have spent decades making peaceful, democratic cases for self-governance. Catalonia. The Basque Country. Scotland. Northern Ireland. Flanders. These are not fringe causes. They represent millions of people, within countries that rank among the world’s most vocal advocates for human rights, who have been systematically denied the right to choose their own political future. The governments suppressing these movements are the same governments that present themselves as models for the rest of the world to follow.
The desire to govern yourself, to build something outside the inherited order of nations and borders, is not new or radical. It is the same impulse that has driven the founding of every country in history. Every state that exists today was, at some point, a community of people who decided they deserved the right to organize their own affairs. Some won that right through war. Some through negotiation. Some through the slow erosion of the empires that once held them.
That same impulse is what drove the founding of The Empire of New Libertalia: a community grounded in liberty, built on shared values, and dedicated to offering something that most places only pretend to offer. Genuine freedom. Not freedom as a talking point, but freedom as a lived principle.
Here is what no one in a position of power wants to admit openly: self-determination has been quietly reclassified from a universal right into a privilege reserved for the already-established. The macronations and international bodies that claim to champion these rights are often the same ones standing in the way when new communities attempt to exercise them. The principle gets celebrated in speeches and formal documents. Then it gets shelved the moment it becomes politically inconvenient.
What we are advocating for is not rebellion, and it is not secession for its own sake. It is far simpler than that. People should be free to choose how they live, how they organize, and what they value, without needing permission from states that had no hand in building what those people are trying to build. Diverse, self-reliant communities built on shared values should not be a threat to anyone. They should be proof that freedom actually works.
We are not naive about our size or our place in the world. New Libertalia is small. We make no claim otherwise. But the argument does not get weaker because the group making it is small. If anything, our size makes the double standard more obvious. A right that only applies to nations powerful enough to enforce it is not a right at all. It is a courtesy extended to those who do not need it.
The measure of a principle is whether it holds when it is costly to uphold. The international community has repeatedly shown that, when it comes to self-determination, the principle holds only for those already holding power.
That is not a right. That is a facade.