Many countries do not regulate the wearing of decorations, and remain neutral as to whether any particular order is legitimate or not. Other countries explicitly regulate what decorations are accepted as legitimate. For example, in Sweden, decisions about medals and orders worn on a military uniform has been delegated to the
General Staff. The criteria of France provide an illustrative example of those nations which take a more regulatory approach: only decorations recognised by the Chancery of the
Legion of Honour may be worn publicly, and permission must be sought and granted to wear any foreign awards or decorations.
Dynastic orders are prohibited unless the dynasty in question is currently recognised as sovereign. (For example, the
Royal Victorian Order is explicitly recognised, whereas the
Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus is not. Another example is the United Kingdom, where legitimacy of any particular order is determined by the Monarch. The private organisation
International Commission on Orders of Chivalry (ICOC) also maintains a set of principles to evaluate whether a chivalric order is genuine. The ICOC is not officially recognised by any international treaty, and their definition is explicitly rejected by many countries (see examples above of France, UK, and Sweden). The ICOC was created as a temporary committee of the
International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences in August 1960, though it has been transformed into a permanent and independent international body. The ICOC argues that a chivalric order must have a
fount of honour () as either its founder or its principal patron in order to be considered genuine. A fount of honour is a person who held
sovereignty either at or before the moment when the order was established. The ICOC considers that holding sovereignty before the founding of an order is considered effective in creation of a genuine chivalric order only if the former sovereign had not abdicated his sovereignty before the foundation of the order but, instead, had been deposed or had otherwise lost power. In the ICOC's view, some organisations create a false
fons honorum in order to satisfy this requirement and give themselves apparent legitimacy; often, the founder or patron of a self-styled order has assumed a
false title of nobility as well as supposed current or former sovereignty. The ICOC maintains a register of which organisations they consider to be genuine chivalric orders. Certain organisations which may appear to have a chivalric character (such as the Augustan Society and the
International Fellowship of Chivalry-Now, which state publicly that they are not chivalric orders) carefully distinguish themselves from self-styled orders of chivalry, orders legitimized by countries, and those viewed as genuine by international bodies. After the medieval era, the exclusive right to confer nobility, titles, knighthoods and membership in Europe's state-recognized orders of chivalry was arrogated by sovereigns, exceptions being recorded in such annals as the
Almanach de Gotha for
dynastic orders granted by royal
consorts (e.g.,
Order of the Starry Cross) or
pretenders. ==Other characteristics==