Inside the world of fake diplomats
When a police officer was fooled into letting a man sporting a home-made diplomatic ID go, it shone a light on a group who believe they don’t have to follow the same laws as everyone else. Benn Bathgate follows a strange trail of threats, firearms, fake d
His name was Jacob O’Bjorn, he was in New Zealand as part of a diplomatic mission and, according to his ID card, he was “not liable to any form of arrest or detention”. His associate Chris O’Peter – the Crown Prince of the New Netherlands – was also here on diplomatic work, and according to his diplomatic ID, “he had a concealed carry licence”.
Almost all of the above is untrue, and only now, more than four years after O’Bjorn – real name Jacob Simonsen – phoned in a threat that saw the Rotorua District Court go into lockdown, can the full, bizarre story of two men with “extreme views ... over whom New Zealand law has no jurisdiction” be told in the wake of a not guilty verdict at the Hamilton District Court.
It’s a saga that shines a light on the seemingly growing “sovereign citizen” movement in New Zealand – people who believe, incorrectly, that individuals can simply opt out of having the law applied to them.
It’s a phenomenon that’s reared its head in relation to matters as varied as dog registration, fake registration plates on a car, council rates, and whether members of the New Zealand Government and authorities should be sentenced to death over Covid mandates.
The law-doesn’t-apply-to-me tactic was also mooted, though later abandoned, in the cold case murder of a 10-month-old baby.
It was a clear thread that ran through the four-year legal saga of Christian Timmerman, aka Chris O’Peter, and Simonsen. And it can only now be reported after Simonsen was found not guilty at a Hamilton District Court judge alone trial on a charge of unlawful possession of an AR15 semi-automatic rifle.
Timmerman was sentenced to nine months’ supervision in the High Court at Hamilton back in 2022 after earlier pleading guilty to two charges of possession of illegal firearms – semiautomatic AR15s – four charges of possession of prohibited magazines, two charges of unlawful possession of ammunition, and one charge of trespass.
The “diplomatic stoush” began on March 11, 2020 with a phone call made to the Rotorua District Court from Simonsen, which, according to the original charge document, “threatened to do an act which could create a risk to health of one or more people”.
Not that this was their first brush with the law.
Two days prior, Timmerman’s black Audi caught the attention of police due to its registration plate – IIIIII1.
According to the police summary of facts, “when the defendant was asked for his driver’s licence, he produced the fraudulent diplomatic immunity card”. Remarkably, it worked.
“On viewing the document, the police officers allowed the defendant to leave in his vehicle in circumstances where they were led to believe he was a diplomat.”
The summary also noted that “both men have extreme views and claim to be sovereign beings over whom New Zealand law has no jurisdiction”.
The alleged offending took a more serious turn when Timmerman arrived at the Rotorua police station and, after being told that the person in charge of “information requests” was unavailable, refused to leave. He was later arrested.
Simonsen also phoned the police in the wake of Timmerman’s arrest, telling them “he was making sure that his associate had not been detained, given that he had diplomatic immunity”.
“He further told police that the defendant Timmerman was a travelling diplomat, and that if he had been detained as a diplomat, that police would now have an international incident to deal with.”
Arriving later in person, Simonsen was
then arrested.
A subsequent search of Timmerman’s motor home, parked outside the police station, uncovered a prohibited AR15 semi-automatic – soon to be the subject of Simonsen’s trial – a prohibited 30-round magazine, a ballistic body armour vest, and “three starter pistols with the appearance of a Glock pistol”.
Later searches at different locations also uncovered huge amounts of ammunition including more than 2000 0.223 rounds, 43 0.22 rounds, and 50 hollow point rounds.
The Rotorua District Court lockdown was prompted by a phone call from Simonsen, on the day Timmerman faced a trespass charge for refusing to leave the police station.
“[Simonsen] started the conversation by saying that he had just had two police officers firing a laser at him and wanted acknowledgement that shooting back was OK,” the summary said.
“He made this comment several times to the court manager. The defendant also commented, ‘So if someone shoots at me, it must be OK for me to shoot back’.”
He also told the court manager, “It’s now time to act”, prompting a lockdown and armed police clearing the court.
That threat, and the subsequent arrests, enabled police to ascertain that the men started to create their fake diplomatic personas as far back as 2019.
“The pair engaged in extensive planning regarding how to make the diplomatic identity cards, and even purchased a highquality card printer,” the summary said.
“They researched what type of crests, watermarks, flags, photographs, titles and the text they should include on the cards, licence plates and vehicle registration label in order to make them appear legitimate.
“The defendants intended that the diplomatic identity cards would give them immunity against detention or arrest.”
The summary also revealed the “agreed text” the pair put on their cards.
“Under international law the bearer of this card shall not be liable to any form of detention or arrest and enjoys immunity from criminal jurisdiction,” it read.
“All appropriate steps shall be taken to prevent any attack on the bearer’s person, freedom or rights and the bearer shall be treated with due respect at all times.”
The Waikato Times understands the pair were also linked in some way to a now defunct website, “Freeman Aotearoa”.
The first page of the website included what could be deemed a concise summary of the sovereign citizen concept: “The majority of people are unaware that New Zealand’s Acts and Statutes (which most understand as Law) applies only to the individuals whom consent to be governed by them.”
University of Otago Law Professor Andrew Geddis was clear that when it came to this concept, “there’s no legal doctrine that permits that to happen at all”. “People in New Zealand are subject to the laws of New Zealand because Parliament says so,” he said.
Geddis said the broad concept was “Government can only govern over us if we consent”.
“They seem to have latched on to an idea of law that’s like magic in Harry Potter,” he said. “Wave a wand and it goes away.”
For Timmerman and Simonsen, while no wand was involved, the majority of their charges did indeed go away.
All the charges relating to their “diplomatic” IDs were tossed, as it was later deemed that there had been no attempt to “defeat justice” at the time the IDs were produced, as the further alleged offending had not taken place.
Simonsen eventually stood trial in Hamilton on reduced charges, after Judge Kim Saunders dismissed a number of unlawful firearm possession charges, as she was “satisfied there was no case to answer”.
Judge Saunders noted that there was “no forensic evidence tying Mr Simonsen to Mr Timmerman’s campervan in March 2020, nor was there any forensic evidence tying him to the firearm”.
She said she was “left thinking Mr Simonsen and Mr Timmerman probably did have joint possession of the prohibited firearm ... But probably and highly likely is not proof beyond reasonable doubt”.
“That meant I had doubt, and led to my verdict of not guilty.”
‘The Court of Jacob’
Simonsen’s sovereign citizen beliefs were also laid bare in a 2020 High Court filing under the Habeas Corpus Act.
According to Geddis, Habeas Corpus is a legal mechanism by which an individual can “challenge the legality of a person’s detention by the State”.
According to the High Court document, “he explained that the Crown Bench of the Court of Jacob has given a direction to Corrections that he be released”.
His attempts to secure release from Rimutaka Prison, however, failed to convince Justice Christine Grice.
“As I explained to Jacob, this court’s obligation is to administer the laws of New Zealand. This does not include enforcement of the orders of the Court of Jacob,” she said.
“The grounds apparent in the documentation include an argument that Jacob is more than one person who was subsumed into an aggregated corporation composing individuals,” the ruling said.
“By subrogation, Jacob became surety for Simonsen, and the dual personality meant Simonsen ‘being a person trust legal entity under administration leaves the man Jacob under legal disability’.
“This I take to mean is that Jacob does not have legal standing so cannot be incarcerated.”
Justice Grice ruled that “the warrant for detention is lawful ... Accordingly, the application is dismissed”.
Its failure was no surprise for Geddis. “His statement of claim appears to be a pastiche of various legal sources/concepts that on their fact appear to be authoritative but in terms of actual legal practice are either meaningless or nonsense,” he said. “This mistaking legal form for actual content and repurposing legal concepts in ways that don’t work in out actual legal system is a quite common trope in Sovereign Citizen arguments.”
‘People often do wish they had some magic word’
According to University of Waikato teaching fellow and author of The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, Dr Matthew X Dentith, a key aspect of the “sovereign citizen” concept is the idea that people are “co-opted into a legal system against your will”.
“People who believe in the freeman-on-theland or sovereign citizen theses (they are similar but not exactly the same) believe that the legal systems which make up nation states are fictitious/illegal, and a more basic legal system (like maritime law) is the only real law of the land,” he said. “So, by rejecting the system they think is inauthentic, they are claiming we – not them – are ignoring the real law.”
Dentith also offered some explanation – with the caveat that it was “educated guesswork”
– as to why people persist in believing in something that is untrue.
“One reason is that people often do wish they had some magic word or phrase which gets them out of trouble, and these beliefs act exactly like that – if you insist that there is a difference between the real you and the legal fiction of you, then you can say, ‘But your laws don’t apply to me!’ in the hope that the judge will go, ‘You got me – you can go free!’.