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Comment by kilo_bravo_3 | Hacker News Reader

You can call yourself a nation, but if the only reason you exist is the fact that the price of the fuel needed to ferry a police officer to your location and arrest you is more than what your country is worth, you're not a nation.

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Note that Sealand is outside of the UK's territorial waters. Technically speaking, that police officer can't legally arrest anyone on Sealand.

Micronations tend to be declared in spots where to do geographic and legal oddity, no larger jurisdiction actually applies.

In 1987, the UK extended their territorial waters to 12 miles, which encompasses Sealand.

But it doesn't work that way.

If there's an entity already there, then the difference is split. You can't just extend your territorial jurisdiction and take over another country.

But that's begging the question, isn't it? If the UK recognizes Sealand as another country, then of course the difference is split. But the UK clearly doesn't, so it will just consider Sealand part of its territorial waters, and every other country (that doesn't recognize Sealand) will side with UK here.

"You can't just extend your territorial jurisdiction and take over another country."

laughs in british

The UK argues that nobody recognised Sealand as a legitimate entity so there's no dispute. I'm not aware of any other countries officially recognizing Sealand as a sovereign nation before the border change.

There are 2 famous cases in the recent history, one is Russia in Crimea and another one was supposed to start yesterday near the Dead Sea. Big fish eats small fish.

Of course you can. There might be consequences, of course, but in the case of Sealand it's very unlikely any other nation will care enough to do anything.

By that metric there's a few macro nations that are "not a nation".

With larger nations, there's also the cost of searching for the fugitive and also of dealing with the foreign nation itself (vis a vis police, military, etc).

It's more than the cost of getting there.

Sealand can be "conquered" on a whim. It exists solely at the pleasure of the UK.

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