Jennifer Ruggles says she believes Hawaii might not be part of the US and participating could leave her open to war crimes charges

A Hawaii politician has refused to attend months of meetings because she believes Hawaii may not actually be a part of the US.

Jennifer Ruggles has served two years as the Hawaii county councilwoman for the district of Puna – the same part of the Big Island that was devastated by the eruption of the Kilauea volcano earlier this year. In August, Ruggles caused a stir at a routine committee meeting when she announced she was concerned that Hawaii was not a part of the US, but instead an occupied foreign country.

“What I’m asking challenges the foundation of everything that we believe to be true in Hawaii,” Ruggles told the Guardian.

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Ruggles, a lifetime Puna resident and progressive, said she came to her conclusion after reading a memo by an independent expert at the United Nations about the claims of the often-ignored Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Ruggles has not voted in a council or committee meeting since, and thus has not been allowed to attend meetings. It has prompted an outcry from Hawaiians who say she is shirking her responsibilities.

The claim that Hawaii is still a part of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and not of the United States, is not new. In fact, it’s a sticky political situation that has led to court cases and provided talking points to more than one US president. But public debate on the topic still has the air of conspiracy theory, because the idea runs so counter to day-to-day administrative and governmental matters in Hawaii.

So the subject tends to be avoided by Hawaiian politicians. The island chain, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2,467 miles from the continental US, became a state in 1959. And for most people, that’s more than enough evidence that it’s part of the US.

Ruggles told the Guardian that she had heard Hawaiian sovereignty arguments for years, but had never researched the claims in detail. Then, in June, an email caught her attention. It contained a February 2018 memo on letterhead from the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations in Geneva. It seemed unusual: support for the idea of Hawaiian sovereignty from an internationally respected third party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 1893, Grover Cleveland called the deposition of the Hawaiian queen ‘an act of war committed ... without the authority of Congress’. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Alfred de Zayas, who reported to the UN’s human rights council, wrote: “[T]he Hawaiian Islands … [make up a] nation state that is under a strange form of occupation by the United States resulting from an illegal military occupation and a fraudulent annexation.”

He said international law stated that under these circumstances, Hawaiian Kingdom law should be carried out in Hawaii – not US law.

Ruggles concluded that De Zayas was right – that Hawaii was never legally annexed by the United States. And once she saw that, she said, she couldn’t un-see the ramifications.

She said: “I didn’t understand international law [before] ... or how foreign annexation actually works. Once you understand that, it becomes clear that there’s a big discrepancy.”

Ruggles became concerned she would be breaking international law by participating on the city council as an agent of the US government – something that could hypothetically leave her open to international war crimes charges.

She told colleagues: “I would like to be clear that this action on my part should not be construed as a publicity stunt but rather on the advice of counsel.”

Yet in the context of her local committee meeting, her concerns were dismissed. A fellow council member, Aaron Chung, told her. “I would urge you to just ignore that [email].”

Ruggles said: “It was uncomfortable. The look on some people’s faces … was horrified. It’s a question that is really challenging the status quo and a lot of people shy away from that. Not a lot of people are up for the consequences, I have been experiencing a lot of retaliation.”

The county’s legal adviser, Joseph Kamelamela, has been dismissive of Ruggles’ concerns and the memo.

He said: “Whatever they claim … has no basis, has no merit. I’ve taken [that] position and even my predecessors have taken [that] position. All we do is file it away because there’s nothing valid.” Kamelamela declined to comment further and said he stood by his comments in the meeting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Clinton signed an ‘apology bill’ in 1993 acknowledging US violation of international law in the process of Hawaiian statehood. Photograph: Phil Mislinski/Getty Images

The office of the Hawaii governor, David Ige, and the US Department of State declined to comment on the memo and Ruggle’s concerns.

Yet as far back as 1893, President Grover Cleveland called the deposition of the Hawaiian queen and her government “an act of war committed … without the authority of Congress”. One hundred years later, Bill Clinton signed the so-called “apology bill”, which laid out the events that led to Hawaii statehood.

Among those events was the formation of a provisional government “without the consent of the native Hawaiian people or the lawful government of Hawaii and in violation of treaties between the two nations and of international law”.

Keanu Sai, a political science lecturer at the University of Hawaii and member of the Hawaiian Kingdom provisional government, says the unilateral annexation of Hawaii by passing a law was tantamount to the US passing a law annexing the UK or any other country.

Sai said: “You can’t pass a law annexing a foreign country.”

A spokesman said De Zayas’s memo did not represent the opinion of the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights. He said: “They are his own views and as such they should not have been sent out using our letterhead.”

De Zayas, who has now finished his term as the investigator and serves as a law professor at the Geneva School of Diplomacy, said he wrote the memo because his job as the independent expert was to promote democracy, equality and “the right of self-determination of peoples (as) an effective conflict-prevention strategy.”

Hawaii is “formally part of the US”, according to De Zayas. But he said it was important for people to understand how it got that way.

Ruggles’ term ends on Monday, but she said she would continue to try to bring attention to what she sees as international law violations in Hawaii. She said she plans to meet representatives from nonprofits such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“And I am going to request that they appoint a special rapporteur,” Ruggles said, “to start documenting human rights violations happening in Hawaii.”