FN Freedom NationSovereignty Initiative
About the Initiative

The science behind the work, and the institutions that sponsor it.

We hold that the work of articulating principles, convening instruments, and reporting on progress must be conducted independently of any State, lest the principles be quietly subordinated to the interests of any administration.

Section 1 — The Sponsors

Custodianship is performed in good faith and in service to the principles.

The Initiative is sponsored, custodially and at its founding, by Qosil, Ltd., a private company organized under the laws of the Republic of Kazakhstan and registered at the Astana International Financial Centre. The choice of a private company as the founding custodian is deliberate, and reversible: custodianship may, in time and by majority of the Signatory body, transfer to another entity better suited to its scale.

Section 2 — The Science of Data Sovereignty

A genome belongs to the person whose body bears it. Data should be no different.

The intellectual core of the Charter rests on a single analogy. The UNESCO Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights affirms that the human genome belongs to the person whose body bears it, and is not to be claimed as the property of any State, corporation, or other party. The Charter extends that same protection, in equal force, to the data of that person.

The four inviolable protections

If data sovereignty is a real right, four operational protections must be present in fact, not merely in law. The Charter's Article 3 names them.

1.Encryption at rest. No party other than the Data Owner — or a party authorized in real time by the Data Owner — possesses the means of decryption.
2.Permission of the owner. No person, organization, or State accesses the data of a Data Owner except by explicit, real-time, and revocable permission.
3.Retrievability by the owner. The Data Owner possesses the unobstructed technical and legal means to retrieve the entirety of their data in a usable, machine-readable form.
4.Retraction by the owner. The Data Owner can compel the permanent destruction of their data — with cryptographic verification of destruction.

The Universal Identifier

The Charter introduces a single cryptographic primitive — the Universal Identifier — by which the actions of any natural person, autonomous agent, or connected device may be unambiguously attributed to a registered, human-attributable owner. The Identifier is designed to preserve the privacy and pseudonymity of its bearer in day-to-day use; attribution is permitted only by the bearer themselves, or, in the narrow circumstances of Article 4.3, by a Signatory State.

The Identifier is the precondition for accountability in an age of autonomous machines. No Autonomous Agent — no artificial intelligence, no robotic system, no Internet-connected device — should be permitted to operate within the jurisdiction of a Signatory State without a registered, human-attributable owner. Personhood is not granted to the Agent; responsibility flows always back to a human or institutional principal.

The open-core sovereignty primitive

The vault is the canonical surface; every service that consumes user data is a derivative. This inversion is what distinguishes data sovereignty from data protection: the latter regulates third-party processors; the former structures the architecture so that the third-party processor never holds the keys.

Section 3 — The Science of the Index

A non-ranking index, by design — and how it produces useful signal anyway.

Conventional international indexes publish a country leaderboard. The IDSI does not. The Charter forbids the publication of adverse signals beyond the absence of mention (Article 12.3). The methodological challenge — and the substantive innovation — is to produce an instrument that gives the international community a useful, neutral, transparent picture of progress without ranking States from "best" to "worst."

Five pillars derived from the Charter

The Index is structured around five pillars, each weighted equally at twenty percent. Each pillar is derived from one or more Articles of the Charter, and each contains a small set of sub-indicators scored on a 0–10 rubric. Thirty-one sub-indicators in total. The pillar score is the unweighted mean of its sub-indicators; the composite is the weighted mean of the five pillar scores on a 0–100 scale.

  • Pillar I — Constitutional and Legal Foundation (Articles 2, 4, 11)
  • Pillar II — Technical and Operational Safeguards (Article 3)
  • Pillar III — Universal Identifier and Agent Provenance (Articles 5, 6)
  • Pillar IV — Sovereign Haven Infrastructure (Article 7)
  • Pillar V — Ecosystem, Education, and Implementation (Articles 8, 10)

Three data sources, in priority

Each sub-indicator is scored from a layered source stack: the State's own self-report under the Annual Survey (where signed); open-source data — UNCTAD Cyberlaw, the IAPP supervisory-authority registry, the OECD AI Policy Observatory, the World Bank ID4D dataset, the ITU Global Cybersecurity Index, the Council of Europe Convention 108 list, the Cushman & Wakefield and CBRE data-center datasets, and others; and voluntary third-party attestation from independent reviewers. The Office of the Custodian publishes every per-State entry under a standing Correction Notice protocol — any State may request, in writing, the publication of a corrected entry within thirty days.

The headline finding of Supplement A

The case for the Charter is strongest in the data. Across the world's top 100 data-center-investing States, the correlation between physical investment and the legal-constitutional pillar (Pillar I) is r = 0.352 — moderate-to-weak. The correlation with the technical, identifier, haven, and ecosystem pillars is materially stronger (r = 0.51 to 0.69). The world has built the data-center, ahead of the constitution that should govern it. That gap is precisely what the Charter exists to close.

Section 4 — Open Solicitation

We solicit your engagement openly.

The Office of the Custodian welcomes corrections to any State's entry, contributions of additional public-source data, scholarly review of methodology, and Founding Member applications from organizations aligned with these principles. The Index, the Charter, and the Initiative as a whole are stronger to the degree that the international community engages with the work.

For corrections and methodology

Write to [email protected]. Use the Correction Notice form supplied at Annex E of Edition 0. The Office of the Custodian commits to publishing a corrected entry within thirty days.

For Founding Member applications

Write to [email protected], or use the form on the Get Involved page. Founding Members are organizations that recognize that the people whose data they receive must remain sovereign over the same.