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Comment by trickstra | Hacker News Reader

> Wikipedia: In international law, terra nullius is territory which belongs to no state. Sovereignty over territory which is terra nullius can be acquired by any state by occupation.

that sounds to me exactly like a third party coming and going "well if nobody wants it..."

Of course, in reality it's always about whether or not you can defend your territory with military power. And it doesn't even need to be unclaimed.

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That's just something someone wrote on Wikipedia. Do you think that if the liberland people showed the Wikipedia page to the police, they would have backed off? The only logical conclusion here is simply that the Wikipedia article is wrong.

Right, but this is disputed land, not unclaimed land.

I expected this comment. The same wikipedia page also says:

> There are currently three territories sometimes claimed to be terra nullius: Bir Tawil (a strip of land between Egypt and Sudan), *four pockets of land near the Danube due to the Croatia–Serbia border dispute*, and parts of Antarctica, principally Marie Byrd Land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius

Next, someone says that wikipedia is not a credible source.

> sometimes claimed

Here, Wikipedia is faithfully recording that some people make that claim. It’s not saying that there’s a consensus or endorsing any claim or its contrary.

The link quite clearly states the land is under dispute. While the two countries may disagree which of them owns it, they quite clearly agree nobody else does. I'm not an expert in international law, but I'm quite confident you would be laughed out of the room trying to claim ownership of the land in an international court.

I'm not trying to become an international lawyer. The thread mentioned terra nullius, so I'm just pointing out what that definition says and what are the real-world examples, where these lands are clearly mentioned. Not sure why somebody gets so triggered by it. Let me point out that these two countries don't just "disagree which one of them owns it", they both say "we don't own it", which makes all the difference. Maybe someone with more knowledge can explain whether Croatia's constitution can say "this land belongs to Serbia", I personally don't see how that would be possible.

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