Scotland Does Not Need to Be Overseas to Be a Colony. The Salt Water Lie: A doctrine invented by colonial powers to protect themselves, never adopted as law, shattered by the UN on 5 continents yet parroted by the Scottish Parliament as settled fact
Joined to Spain by an isthmus, Gibraltar has thirty-four thousand inhabitants and covers 5.8 square kilometres. You can walk out of it in an afternoon. Gibraltar has been on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (NSGTs), the register of the world's remaining colonies, continuously since 1946. Every year, the UN General Assembly adopts a decision on its decolonisation.
All 17 territories currently on that list total about 1.6 million people. Scotland has 5.5 million inhabitants and a diaspora in the tens of millions. It has a legal system older than its administering, colonising state (the English colonial state), two indigenous languages, a documented existence as an independent sovereign kingdom extending back beyond the 9th century. It shares the same administering/colonial Power with Gibraltar and nine other territories/colonies on the list out of seventeen. The English colonial state remains the world’s major coloniser until today.
Scotland is not on the list today. The objection raised whenever anyone asks why; usually without an argument or a citation, frequently by people who have never once examined it thoroughly or at all; is that Scotland shares a land border with England. “Colonies are overseas” they say.
What that sentence is doing isn’t answering the evidence. It represents a rule about which evidence may be looked at, written by the people the evidence concerns.
That proposition is false and unsupported. It’s a fabrication with a documented author, date and goal; manufactured in the 1950s by states protecting themselves from scrutiny. It has been contradicted by UN practice in every decade since.
This post demonstrates that and then shows what follows for Scotland.
Abstract
We have four findings here.
1. The governing texts contain no geographical criterion. Article 73 of the UN Charter identifies its subject as peoples who have not attained a full measure of self-government. Resolution 1514 (XV) or the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, contains no territorial qualification whatsoever. Resolution 1541 (XV) establishes in Principle IV a prima facie evidentiary presumption based on geographical separation, but directs the substantive inquiry in Principle V, to administrative, political, economic, juridical and historical subordination. A rebuttable presumption has been silently converted into a necessary condition. That single act of misreading constitutes the doctrine’s entire foundation.
2. The thesis represents the residue of a political defeat, certainly not a legal development. Between 1952 and 1960, Belgium argued that Chapter XI applied to subordinated peoples inside independent states. The argument was textually sound and was never answered. At the time, it was defeated by states with internal dependencies to protect, including the United States. What survived is the last rule of the pre-Charter colonial order, preserved inside the instrument built to dismantle it.
3. The category of "colonial situation" in UN practice is broader than the list. Oman was never listed, yet Resolution 2073 (XX) recognized its colonial condition. Algeria was never listed yet its right of self-determination was recognised by Resolution 1573 (XV). Palestine has never been listed while being characterised as a colonial situation repeatedly. The UN Special Committee on Decolonization’s (also called the C-24) own participants said so plainly at Managua in 2015 and 2026 in key official regional seminars. More territories and peoples suffer occupation and colonisation than listed.
4. Listing is reversible. The administering, colonial Power does not control it. Kanaky-New Caledonia was reinscribed in 1986 after 40 years of French silence. Māʻohi Nui (French Polynesia) was reinscribed in 2013, 66 years after removal, without a vote and over France's furious protest.
The post then applies this to Scotland; establishing that Scotland satisfies every criterion in Resolution 1541. Decolonisation and secession are distinct legal categories which a recent inquiry of the devolved Scottish legislature at Holyrood conflated. In international law, the administering, colonial Power's constitutional self-description cannot determine the question. The denial of the right constitutes a continuing internationally wrongful act under the law of state responsibility.
A note on vocabulary
A Non-Self-Governing Territory (NSGT) is the United Nations' formal name for a colony. The word "colony" was politically complicated in 1945 when the states drafting the Charter still governed most of the world. A euphemism was used. 17 territories remain listed today but this does not represent all colonial situations globally.
The Special Committee on Decolonization (United Nations Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples), universally called the C24, has considered these territories every year since 1961. The Fourth Committee is the General Assembly's main committee for political and decolonisation questions.
Prima facie means "at first sight". A prima facie case is one presumed established unless rebutted. It’s a threshold, by no means a definition.
Erga omnes means "towards all". An obligation owed erga omnes is owed to the international community as a whole. Every state has a legal interest in its observance. No single state can waive it. A coloniser cannot settle a decolonisation question privately with or against the people it colonises. Every other state has standing. None may agree to look away. As confirmed in Chagos (2019), decolonisation is an obligation erga omnes.
Jus cogens means peremptory norms of general international law permitting no derogation; overriding any treaty or domestic arrangement inconsistent with it. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed in its July 2024 Advisory Opinion (Occupied Palestinian Territory) that the right to self-determination is a norm of jus cogens.
ARSIWA is the International Law Commission's Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001), the authoritative statement of customary law on when a state is legally responsible for its conduct.
An administering Power (colonial power) is the state responsible for an NSGT. Four are named today: France, New Zealand, the “United Kingdom” and the United States. Ten of the seventeen territories are administered by the “United Kingdom” i.e. the English colonial state, which makes it, 80 years after the list was created, still the largest colonial administrator on earth.
WHAT THE TEXTS ACTUALLY SAY
Article 73 of the Charter
Chapter XI is the operative provision. Article 73 binds:
Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government.
That’s the criterion. It concerns the political condition of a people not a territory’s location. The words "overseas", "sea", "island", "distant", "non-contiguous" appear nowhere in Chapter XI. Neither does any synonym nor any provision from which such a requirement could be built.
The Charter is exact about geography wherever geography is supposed to operate. Article 52 addresses regional arrangements. Chapters XII & XIII identify trust territories by legal origin; former League mandates, territories detached from enemy states, territories voluntarily placed; and not by distance from anywhere. The drafters knew how to write a geographical condition. In Article 73, they wrote a political one.
The pattern is clear. Article 1(2) states the UN’s purpose as respect for equal rights and self-determination of peoples. Article 55 repeats it. Article 73(b) requires administering, colonial powers to develop self-government with due account of the political aspirations of the peoples concerned. Nowhere is a people's entitlement conditioned on the sea or being overseas.
Resolution 66 (I); the accused wrote the list
The first list was compiled under UN General Assembly Resolution 66 (I) of 14 December 1946.
Eight member states (Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) transmitted information about territories for which they accepted an obligation under Article 73(e). 72 territories were enumerated. The UN applied no geographical test; recording what the colonial powers were willing to concede.
That list is routinely produced as evidence that the category is inherently maritime, with supposedly an “overseas” criteria. It certainly isn’t. It represents evidence of what administering, colonial Powers chose to declare in 1946 when the UN had no machinery to contradict them and no majority willing to try.
Reasoning from the 1946 inventory to a rule of law is mistaking the the colonisers’ self-interested declaration for the law they were being made subject to.
It’s not a theoretical point. France transmitted on Kanaky-New Caledonia, Dependencies and on the French Establishments in Oceania; then simply stopped, sending nothing after 1946-47. When the UN General Assembly returned to those territories decades later, it treated France's silence as having altered nothing. French colonialism was still present and active.
Resolution 1514 (XV)
The Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was adopted on 14 December 1960 by 89 votes to none, with 9 abstentions. 43 Asian and African states sponsored it. The abstentions came from the colonial powers including the “United Kingdom”.
The state that administers and colonises Scotland declined to support the decolonisation’s founding instrument.
Resolution 1514 contains no geographical, territorial or “overseas” criterion at all. Paragraph 2 affirms all peoples’ right to self-determination. Paragraph 3 provides that inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness shall never serve as a pretext for delaying independence. Paragraph 5 requires immediate steps to transfer all powers to the peoples of Trust and NSGTs "or all other territories which have not yet attained independence".
The entire regime’s constitutive instrument stays silent on distance and contiguity, expressly reaching beyond the listed territories.
Resolution 1541 (XV); what it really expresses
This is the source of every “serious” version of the salt water argument. But it doesn’t declare what it’s said to declare.
Its title states its function; Principles which should guide Members in determining whether or not an obligation exists to transmit the information called for under Article 73(e) of the Charter. This is simply guidance not a definition of colonialism. It never claims to be.
Principle IV provides:
Prima facie there is an obligation to transmit information in respect of a territory which is geographically separate and is distinct ethnically and/or culturally from the country administering it.
The following elements are lethal.
(i) Prima facie is the key. A prima facie case is an evidentiary threshold at which an obligation is presumed to exist, which is subject to supplementation and rebuttal. Converting a rebuttable presumption into a necessary condition constitutes an elementary error on which the whole doctrine rests. Colonial powers have always tried to hide their colonies in plain sight. Sometimes the evidence is hidden given the colonial power’s propaganda and control. Everyone in the world knows Scotland but not everyone understands it’s an English colony yet given the English colonial state’s propaganda and domination.
(ii) The phrase is "geographically separate" not "overseas". Geographical separateness under Principle IV requires territorial distinctness with an identifiable, bounded territory. It’s not in any way a measure of distance or a requirement of intervening water. Nothing in the text converts separateness into overseas or maritime separation. Halting at Principle IV converts an evidentiary threshold into a false definition. No subsequent resolution has done so. Basheer AlZoughbi writing for the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha puts it clearly. The definition cannot be confined to “overseas” colonies. Colonisation can perfectly occur where a state colonises a contiguous territory, across a land border. No doubt about that and factually proven.
(iii) Principle IV was drafted against a caseload not a concept. Most territories at issue in 1960 happened to be overseas. This represents a fact about who had been listed in 1946. It never was a criterion of law. Legal categories are not silently amended by the incidental characteristics of the first cases to arrive, least of all where those cases were chosen by the respondents.
(iv) Principle V exists here. Once a prima facie case of distinctness is established, other elements may be brought in (administrative, economic, political, historical, legal). Where these affect the relationship, arbitrarily placing the territory in a subordinated position or status, they support the presumption that an obligation exists.
Principle V forms the substantive test, directing the enquiry to the character of the relationship; above all to arbitrary subordination.
Any reading of Resolution 1541 which might halt at the word "geographically" in Principle IV, never arriving at Principle V, is not a reading of Resolution 1541. It’s a reading of six words of it.
Resolution 2625 (XXV); the conditionality always quoted but never applied
The Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations or Resolution 2625 (XXV) of 24 October 1970 restates self-determination; adding the safeguard clause. It’s the provision most often deployed against Scotland. Yet, it’s used by omission.
Territorial integrity is indeed protected for:
States conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples as described above and thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction as to race, creed or colour.
The protection is conditional, attached to states complying with self-determination and with a government representing all the territory’s people. It’s withheld from states which don’t.
This represents the legal mechanism distinguishing legitimate territorial integrity from colonial domination disguised with a coat of “territorial integrity”. A state overriding a people's democratic majorities election after election, extracts their natural resources to the metropolitan/colonial centre, stations nuclear weapons on their territory against their settled will, curtails their legislature's competence without its consent, and refuses to allow any lawful process towards self-determination is certainly not a state "representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction". The English colonial state disguised as the UK cannot claim territorial integrity protection against that nation's self-determination. We’re not even mentioning annexation and territorial alienation which are now fully demonstrated.
The clause is routinely cited against Scotland yet in truncated form with the protection named but the conditions deliberately forgotten since they would make the argument collapse.
The normative weight of these instruments
People sometimes say that UN General Assembly resolutions are just recommendations and do not carry legal force.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) addressed this in Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons (1996), holding at paragraph 70 that such resolutions may have normative value. They may evidence the existence of a rule or the emergence of opinio juris (the conviction among states that a practice is legally required) and that a series of resolutions may show the gradual evolution of the opinio juris required for a new rule.
The decolonisation resolutions form the paradigm case of such a series. In Chagos (2019), the Court confirmed that the right to self-determination had crystallised as customary international law. Obligations to complete decolonisation are owed erga omnes.
Andrés Rigo Sureda concluded as early as 1973 that, within the context of colonialism, self-determination had become a peremptory norm. A state's title to a territory having colonial status is void. Not defective or contestable. Void. The International Law Commission's 2022 Draft Conclusions list self-determination among peremptory norms. In July 2024, in its Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the Court held for the first time in its history that self-determination constitutes a peremptory norm of international law.
WHERE THE LIE CAME FROM
The Belgian Thesis
The salt water thesis has a non-legal history, recording a political defeat inflicted on an inconvenient reading of the UN Charter by the states that would lose from it.
From 1952 to 1960, Belgium argued before the Fourth Committee and the Committee on Information from NSGTs that Chapter XI applied to any people who had not attained a full measure of self-government, including peoples inside independent states borders, where their subordination to the dominant population/colonisers placed them in a colonial situation, under colonisation. The “Belgian thesis” sought to extend Chapter XI to parts of the colonial metropolis inhabited by such peoples, reviving Article 23(b) of the League of Nations Covenant, which had bound members to secure just treatment of the native inhabitants of territories under their control.
The argument was presented by Belgium's permanent representative, Fernand van Langenhove, in The Question of the Aborigines before the United Nations: The Belgian Thesis (Brussels, Royal Colonial Institute of Belgium, 1954).
Belgium's motive was cynical but its law was correct. Under mounting pressure over the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo/DRC), Belgium set out to expose the UN’s hypocrisy scrutinising overseas colonial empires while ignoring subordinated populations inside its critics’ own borders. The motive is disreputable. But Belgium wasn’t inventing a reading of Article 73. It was simply applying the article as written.
Its opponents never answered the text. They defeated the proposition politically. The US diplomatic record openly shows it. The Foreign Relations of the United States volume for 1952-1954 records that the Belgian representative in the 4th Committee had been employing counterattack tactics, maintaining that Article 73’s scope should be widened to include aboriginal populations in many countries; noting that this was unpopular with UN members who were concerned. The Center for World Indigenous Studies highlights that the US countered with the “blue water rule”, sidestepping the Belgian proposal while gaining support from the many member states with indigenous peoples.
Belgium eventually withdrew from the Committee on Information, stating in the Fourth Committee in October 1957 that its interpretation of Article 73(e) had never changed since signing the Charter in 1945.
Aim of the counter-thesis
The response brought Resolution 637 (VII) of 16 December 1952 and Resolution 742 (VIII) of 27 November 1953. It was then embedded in Principle IV of Resolution 1541; associating the Chapter XI obligation with territories separated from the colonial metropolis.
The states most active in securing that outcome were those with internal dependencies to defend; explaining the doctrine's provenance. The salt water thesis doesn’t originate from the UN Charter. It can be seen as a defensive move to prevent Chapter XI’s application in certain cases.
It forms the last surviving rule of the pre-Charter colonial legal order; elaborated by colonial powers and placed inside the very instrument designed to dismantle their colonial position. Every other doctrine of that colonial order has been mostly dismantled (terra nullius, the standard of civilisation, the right of conquest, the tutelary theory of trusteeship). This colonial doctrine survived, dissimulated in a procedural annex about data transmission.
Let’s note that colonial administrators found the Belgian analysis pleasant when it suited them. In In Defence of Colonies (1957), Sir Alan Burns denounced what he called “internal colonialism”, in which an educated minority controls the indigenous population, observing that overland empires deployed many of the same mechanisms of rule as overseas ones. The observation was self-serving and made by a “British” colonial governor.
What the literature already knows
The indigenous-rights literature recognises the salt water thesis as an exclusion instrument to remove peoples within the borders of existing states from decolonisation, becoming the unfinished business of decolonisation (James (Sa'ke'j) Youngblood Henderson).
The Chairperson-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Erica-Irene Daes, said the situation needed belated state-building. The 1960 settlement left work undone, including Scotland as an annexed and colonised sovereign state.
The salt water thesis is therefore not neutral and was a tool to prevent the examination of contiguous and internal colonial relationships.
WHAT THE UNITED NATIONS HAS ACTUALLY DONE
The list is a list, not the actual concept or definition
UN practice distinguishes between the actual list (a register from Article 73(e) transmission obligations) and the actual, colonial situation, which results from a substantive characterisation applied by the General Assembly on the merits. They aren’t equivalent; the evidence being unambiguous.
As seen in a previous post in the Colonial Markers series, Oman was never listed. By Resolution 2073 (XX) of 17 December 1965 the General Assembly considered that the English state’s colonial presence prevented the people from exercising their rights to self-determination and independence, demanding the “United Kingdom” to withdraw its troops and eliminate its colonial domination. London had always insisted the Sultanate was an independent state in which it had no influence. The Assembly refused it.
Algeria was never defined or listed as a NSGT. France maintained it was constitutionally part of metropolitan France, organised as French départements like any other. The question fell within domestic jurisdiction under Article 2(7). The Assembly placed the question on its agenda from 1955. Through Resolution 1573 (XV) of 19 December 1960, five days after Resolution 1514, recognised the right of the Algerian people to self-determination and independence. Algeria was a French colony.
Consider clearly what that means. Algeria represents one of the paradigmatic colonial cases of the 20th century yet it was never on the UN list.
Palestine was never listed either while being characterised as a colonial situation repeatedly with Resolution 3092 (XXVIII) of 1973 on annexation and colonisation of the territories occupied since 1967; Resolution 3525 (XXX) of 1975; Resolution 34/44 of 1979 reaffirming the inalienable right of the peoples of Namibia and Zimbabwe, of the Palestinian people, and of all peoples under colonial and alien domination, with express reaffirmation of Resolution 1514.
The Special Committee's own participants have also declared it. At the Caribbean Regional Seminar on Decolonization at Managua on 19 May 2015, the United Nations' own record of proceedings notes that while some called it shameful that 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories remained, others said that even more territories and peoples around the world suffered under occupation and colonization but were not listed as such by the UN. This was also said at the recent same 2026 C-24 regional seminar in Managua too where Liberation Scotland was present. Scotland was said to be a colony waiting at the door to be listed on the UN NSGT list; requiring UN General Assembly evaluation under Resolution 1541 (XV).
The 2015 seminar also recorded something directly valid and applicable to Scotland. Among the growing dangers identified was the resurgence of the archetypal colonial mentality on the part of the major Western Powers, which also happened to be the NSGT administering Powers, whose roots lay in their claims to some other people's natural resources.
The consequence is clear. The question is not whether a territory appears in a register compiled from what administering Powers declared about themselves in 1946 but whether the territory is in a colonial situation on the substantive test. Inscription is a remedy pursued not a precondition.
Contiguity is not a barrier. The cases
Namibia (South West Africa) shares a land border with South Africa with no sea or ocean between them. South Africa administered it under a League mandate, seeking its incorporation as a 5th province. It applied its own law there and maintained the matter was one of domestic jurisdiction. The UN General Assembly refused to sanction incorporation, terminating the mandate by Resolution 2145 (XXI) of 27 October 1966. The UNGA then treated the territory within the decolonisation framework. The ICJ addressed it in 1950, 1955, 1956 and, decisively, 1971, holding South Africa's continued presence unlawful.
Subject to an incorporation (colonisation) claim, Namibia as a contiguous territory was treated as a colonial situation for four decades. If the salt water thesis was valid and applied, this could not have happened.
East Timor shares a land border with Indonesia’s West Timor on the same island. Following the 1975 invasion validated by the US, Indonesia annexed it and constitutionally incorporated it as its 27th province at the time. On the annexing state's own account, the matter was fully settled and domestic. The UN said no with General Assembly Resolution 3485 (XXX) and Security Council Resolutions 384 (1975) and 389 (1976). East Timor remained listed with Portugal retained as administering Power. The ICJ affirmed in East Timor (Portugal v. Australia) (1995) that self-determination is erga omnes. Independence followed a UN-supervised consultation in 1999.
There was no water or ocean. The constitutional annexation was done. Neither fact affected the legal position; a full refutation of the contiguity objection.
Western Sahara shares an extensive land border with Morocco, which administers it as its Southern Provinces; insisting it forms an integral part of the Moroccan state. It’s still listed. The ICJ, in its advisory opinion of 16 October 1975, examined the historical and legal ties asserted by Morocco and Mauritania; concluding they were not of a nature to affect the application of Resolution 1514 or the requirement of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the peoples’ will.
Historical and legal ties to the claiming state do not extinguish the right, which applies to any case in which a state points to a historical instrument as proof that a territory belongs to it. So it applies directly to 1707.
Gibraltar shares a land frontier with Spain, in Europe while being listed since 1946 by the same administering Power that administers Scotland. Ifni, a Spanish territory enclosed by Moroccan land, was addressed within the framework by Resolution 2072 (XX) of 16 December 1965.
The Portuguese "overseas provinces" were not listed. On admission to the UN, Portugal maintained it administered no NSGTs. Angola, Mozambique, Guinea and the rest were constitutionally integral provinces of a single Portuguese state. The Assembly rejected this by Resolution 1542 (XV) of 15 December 1960, listing them notwithstanding Portugal's constitutional position.
A state's own constitutional characterisation of a territory does not determine its international status.
Delisting and relisting. Who holds the pen
Delisting requires an act of the UNGA. Puerto Rico was removed by Resolution 748 (VIII) of 1953; Greenland by Resolution 849 (IX) of 1954; Alaska and Hawaii by Resolution 1469 (XIV) of 1959. In each case the Assembly assessed whether the change of status satisfied the UN Charter. It has since always affirmed that only it may authorise removal. Delegates at Managua in 2015 noted that in removing Puerto Rico the Assembly had left open the possibility of revisiting the matter.
Unilateral cessation of transmission has no legal effect. Resolution 41/41A of 2 December 1986 recites France's silence expressly. The Assembly recalled the 1946 transmission while noting that no further information had been transmitted since. The UNGA still considered Kanaky-New Caledonia to be a NSGT within the meaning of the UN Charter; declaring that an obligation existed on France to transmit information. Forty years of silence extinguished nothing.
Reinscription happens against the administering Power. Kanaky-New Caledonia in 1986, following the South Pacific Forum at Suva and the Non-Aligned Movement at Harare. Māʻohi Nui (French Polynesia) by Resolution 67/265 of 17 May 2013, adopted without a vote, sixty-six years after removal, following the Assembly of French Polynesia at Papeete in 2011, the Pacific Islands Forum, the Polynesian Leaders Group, and the Non-Aligned Movement at Tehran in 2012. (A very interesting coalition for Scotland.) France called it blatant interference in its internal affairs; boycotting the proceedings for a decade.
A metropolitan characterisation does not close the question, even after decades. The administering, colonial Power's protest does not stop the UNGA. France protested yet the resolution passed without a vote. The route runs through regional solidarity and the Non-Aligned Movement. (Scotland needs to be creative here while following successful examples.)
The anti-self-judgment principle
If a colonised territory's international status were fixed by the constitutional law of the state administering it colonially, decolonisation could never have happened. Every colonial power had a domestic framework under which its territories were lawfully held. Portugal and France had a constitution. South Africa had an Act of Parliament. Indonesia had a decree. Each was internally valid while being internationally irrelevant.
The Permanent Court of International Justice held in Nationality Decrees Issued in Tunis and Morocco (1923) that whether a matter is solely within domestic jurisdiction is a relative question, which is dependent on the development of international relations. This means it’s a question of international law.
Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) precludes a party from invoking internal law to justify non-performance. Article 3 of ARSIWA provides that the characterisation of an act as internationally wrongful is governed by international law and unaffected by its characterisation as lawful under internal law.
"This territory is constitutionally integral to our state and so is not a colony" is not an argument but a restatement of the position under examination.
SECESSION IS NOT DECOLONISATION
Everything we've talked about is about whether Scotland's situation can even be looked at. This part is about a mix-up that stops anyone from ever looking at it.
Two categories, two bodies of law
Secession is the withdrawal of a territory from a lawfully constituted sovereign state, which it joined by legitimate means. It has no automatic basis in international law. It must be negotiated with the parent state. Some constitutions provide mechanisms for it; most do not.
Decolonisation is the return of sovereignty to a people unlawfully subjugated. It represents an inalienable right under Resolution 1514, exercisable without the coloniser's agreement. Every state is under an obligation to assist its completion. It’s international law.
The difference is very clear and easy to see. Secession is a constitutional exit from a lawful union. Decolonisation is a remedial restoration to a people unlawfully held.
Both processes produce a state while "self-determination" names the right in both cases and the ICJ declined in Kosovo (2010) to hold unilateral declarations of independence unlawful. Therefore, the two are constantly conflated, including by people who should know better and in official language.
That conflation is never neutral. It constitutes a useful confusion available to a colonial state.
A colonised territory cannot secede from a state of which it is not lawfully a part. To require it to negotiate for an independence it never surrendered, with a state to which it never ceded sovereignty, is to require it to seek a divorce where there was no marriage. Framing decolonisation as secession puts a veneer of legitimacy on the coloniser's territorial claim before the claim has been examined.
Why the language persists
The UN Secretariat and the ICJ are creatures of interstate law and generally take member states' constitutional arrangements at face value to avoid interfering in internal affairs. Given the the English colonial state hidden behind the “United Kingdom” veil presents Scotland as a constituent part of its metropolitan territory, procedural language often mirrors that presentation.
This cannot be considered as an endorsement. It’s just deference to a characterisation which has not yet been challenged.
Domestically, the constitutional academy uses the language of secession because its own framework requires it. If Scotland is lawfully within the colonial union, secession is the only available concept. The possibility that the union is invalid and never existed, with Scotland a dependency, is not admitted as worth discussing. Therefore, it’s never discussed and never becomes admissible.
The consequence for Scotland
If Scotland is a partner in a lawful unitary state, secession is the route and Westminster's agreement is required.
If Scotland is not a partner, if the Treaty of Union was procured by coercion and never validly performed, if the English state continued unaltered under a new name with Scotland added to its domains (which is now fully demonstrated), then the applicable framework is decolonisation (and state resumption in Scotland’s very strong and unique case). Westminster's agreement is not required at all.
Everything turns on which of these is true. It’s a question of international law, not domestic constitutional law; and not the property of any domestic court. We know the demonstration is clear that Scotland is a colony and suffers from annexation from the English colonial state. It now needs to be examined by the UNGA and the ICJ, for these international institutions to say it officially.
EUPHEMISM AS LEGAL TECHNIQUE
AlZoughbi's paper evoked above makes a methodological contribution which bears directly on Scotland. He documents the systematic inconsistency by which the French colonies and colons are rendered into English as "settlements" and "settlers", including in the official French and English texts of the ICJ, whose Statute makes both official. He traces the slippage to the Permanent Court's 1923 opinion, whose French title concerned colons d'origine allemande while its English title concerned settlers.
The choice of term is not neutral. The euphemism does legal work by removing a relationship from the category in which it belongs.
The transposition is immediate. "Devolution"; "Union"; "Voluntary partner"; "Integral part"; "Internal affair"; "Constitutional settlement"; "The national question"; "Separatism". Each describes a relationship of subordination in vocabulary drawn from a different legal category, removing it from scrutiny before it even begins.
The salt water thesis is the most successful instance of the technique in the field. It’s not merely a euphemism but a legal roadblock built out of one; turning a question about the character of a relationship into a question about where a coastline happens to be.
SCOTLAND
Principle IV. The prima facie case
Scotland is a clear, bounded territory with frontiers settled by international treaty, substantially unchanged since the 13th century. Scotland has its own legal system (which has kept running since 1707 although increasingly with English trespassing and interfering; and we know the colonial Treaty was never implemented and violates the Claim of Right as a pre-condition to the Treaty), its own church, its own school system, two native languages, and a unique national identity recognized by the administering state despite its previous linguicide against Scots, international sports and cultural groups, and everyday global use.
That refers to geographic separation as defined by Principle IV (a distinct, bounded, and easily identifiable territory) along with the separate ethnic and cultural identity that the Principle mentions.
The prima facie case is extremely clear right from the text of the document itself.
Principle V. Arbitrary subordination
Juridical. The devolved legislature was created by section 1 of the Scotland Act 1998, an Act of the Westminster Parliament. Its competence is bounded by Schedule 5. Section 28(7) expressly preserves Westminster's power to make laws for Scotland. Powers are lent, bounded and revocable. The body is abolishable by the authority that made it.
Political. The constitution, the Union, foreign affairs, defence, and substantial fiscal and energy competences are reserved. The devolved legislature cannot lawfully legislate for a referendum on the constitutional question. Its competence was further curtailed by the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 without its consent.
Economic. Resource revenues, borrowing powers, trade policy and the fiscal framework are determined at the metropolitan, colonial centre, which is precisely the mentality the Managua seminar identified in 2015 with colonial Powers whose colonial reflex is rooted in claims to another people's natural resources. Scotland’s wealth is colonially plundered and extracted by the English colonial state. This blog will come back to that later.
Historical. The 1707 instruments, the circumstances of their procurement, and their subsequent operation.
Whether all of this adds up to unfair control and arbitrary subordination is the question raised by Principle V. It requires proof and debate, but it has never actually been asked. We, of course, know the answer. Scotland is an English colony.
Non-transmission has no effect
The English colonial state has never transmitted information on Scotland under Article 73(e). Resolution 41/41A states that it doesn't matter that France had transmitted nothing on Kanaky-New Caledonia since 1946. The UNGA still declared the obligation existed.
A colonizing power staying silent doesn't count as making a decision. It just means they haven't made one at all.
State resumption. Why Scotland threatens nobody
Scotland's claim is not about any secession or regional minority rights or autonomy. Instead, it is a claim to restore the sovereignty of a state, a case of state resumption or state recovery, that existed continuously and was internationally recognized for about eight centuries before 1707; a kingdom dating back to the 9th century, whose independence was declared at Arbroath in 1320, recognized by England in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, and which operated as an independent European state until the colonial Union with its own diplomacy and treaties all over Europe.
The fake, colonial 1707 Union was created by agreements between two independent, sovereign kingdoms. This matters hugely for any government/state looking at the issue; a case built on an international treaty between a formerly sovereign state and a colonial power is completely unique and non-generalisable. It cannot be used by any region or territory that doesn't have a similar past international agreement.
Because of this, the Scottish situation sets no precedent for internal independence or “secessionist” movements anywhere else. It doesn't threaten the territorial borders and territorial-integrity of other countries that have their own internal separatist groups. This isn't just a clever talking point but a very important thing foreign governments need to understand.
Estoppel; the administering Power's own definition
In 1954, the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs stated that: “Scotland is a nation and voluntarily entered into union with England as a partner and not as a dependency.”
That characterisation/description was provided by the colonial/administering Power, used as the excuse to report nothing under Article 73(e).
Notice what this trick does. It makes Scotland's entire status depend on a single determinative criterion (“partnership”), letting the colonial power write that rule itself. A state that invents a definition and uses it internationally has to live with the consequences. Under the rules of good faith (specifically Article 27 of the Vienna Convention and Article 3 of ARSIWA), that government cannot later use its own internal laws to escape the standard it created for itself.
The question isn't whether Westminster claims Scotland is a voluntary partner but whether the relationship actually is one when measured against Principle V.
This leads to one more consequence created by the 1954 definition. If the partnership it claims was never legally formed in the first place, then by the colonial power’s own logic, using a privative definition that hinges entirely on the absence of a true partnership, Scotland defaults to what that very definition tried to rule out: a colony or dependency.
The constitutional self-negation
Even the “UK” Government's own submission to the Scottish Parliament admits that the UK's setup is built on the 1706 Treaty of Union (passed in the 1707 Acts) and that the Scotland Act keeps the Union strictly under the control of the Westminster Parliament.
Now compare that with section 37 of the Scotland Act 1998, which states that the Acts of Union only apply if they fit within the rules of that later Act.
This is a total and undeniable contradiction.
If the Treaty and Acts of Union are the foundation that gives Westminster its power in Scotland, then Westminster, which was created by those very documents, cannot place itself above them or change them with later laws. The creation cannot overrule its creator. For section 37 to be legal, Westminster would need power that existed before and above the documents that formed it, which is impossible. It cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps.
Cambridge Professor Mark Elliott has made the narrower point in the domestic register. The assertion that Parliament may legislate in breach of the “United Kingdom’s” treaty obligations is, he observes, mundane as a matter of domestic law but quite irrelevant as a matter of international law, resting as it does on the assumption that parliamentary sovereignty somehow transcends its necessarily domestic context so as to affect the Anglo-British state's legal position as a state
Only one of two things can be true. Either section 37 is illegal (ultra vires) for trying to subordinate the Acts of Union, or the Acts of Union are not actually where Westminster gets its authority in Scotland. If it's the latter, then no legal source of power has ever been found, no lawful union exists and the rule over Scotland rests on nothing more than holding onto the territory by force.
In international law, holding onto a territory without any legal or constitutional foundation has a very specific name; and it is certainly not "partnership".
The continuing wrongful act
Scotland is a people entitled to self-determination. That right is being denied. That denial constitutes an internationally wrongful act. The law of state responsibility is very specific about the consequences.
Article 3: whether a government's action is illegal under international law is decided by international law alone, not by whether its own domestic laws say it is legal.
Article 4: the conduct of any state organ is an act of that state, whether the organ exercises legislative, executive or judicial functions.
Those two articles together dispose of a great deal. When the “United Kingdom” Supreme Court colonially ruled in 2022 that the principle of self-determination is "simply not in play here", it was making a decision about international legal status; claiming Scotland is not a colony; which no domestic court has jurisdiction or legal power to make. Furthermore, it did so as part of the exact state whose actions are being challenged.
A state cannot act as a judge in its own lawsuit. That ruling is simply an action taken by the accused party, not a fair, independent judgment of the claim.
Article 14: a continuing violation of the law lasts for the entire time the action keeps happening.
Articles 30 and 31: the responsible state must cease the act and make full reparation.
Article 32: it cannot use its own internal laws as an excuse for failing to comply.
Articles 40 and 41: a severe or systematic failure to fulfil an obligation arising under a peremptory norm is a serious breach. When this happens, all other nations are required to work together to stop it and are forbidden from recognizing the resulting situation as legal.
Self-determination was confirmed as a peremptory norm by the International Court of Justice's own ruling in 2024. Because of that, the strict consequences outlined in Articles 40 and 41 automatically kick in the moment the underlying violation is established.
What the state has already conceded
Statements made by people exercising government authority count as acts of the state. The record contains several examples.
The UK Government's own 2013 paper: Successive UK governments have stated that if a majority of people in any part of the multi-national UK clearly desire to leave through a fair and democratic process, the UK government would not try to stop it.
John Major (Prime Minister, 1993): Stated that no nation could be kept in a Union against its will permanently.
Theresa May (Prime Minister, 2019): Stated that the Union rests on and is defined by the support of its people, and will endure as long as it enjoys popular support in Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland.
Professor Marc Weller (Cambridge University; Chatham House): Drew the legal conclusion that for Scotland, the right to leave is established informally through UK constitutional practice. International law recognizes this type of constitutional authority, whether it is explicitly written down or implied through practice, which falls under the international law doctrine of constitutional self-determination.
George Katrougalos (UN Independent Expert, September 2025; also former Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs): Noted at the Palais des Nations at the UN in Geneva in September 2025 during Liberation Scotland’s historic conference on Scotland’s right to self-determination in international law that UK constitutional practice is shaped by political convention as much as formal law. He pointed out that the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement helped shape such a convention, establishing a precedent for the future, meaning the people of Scotland possess a constitutional right to determine their political future.
Scotland in the record
This position is now officially part of the United Nations record. Document UN A/HRC/61/NGO/210, a written statement submitted to the 61st session of the Human Rights Council and to the UN Secretary General by the International Probono Legal Services Association Limited (IPLSA, a major Chinese NGO with ECOSOC consultative status) and endorsed by Liberation Scotland along with other partners notably from Kanaky-New Caledonia highlights specific territories under colonial sovereignty.
The document explicitly names Māʻohi Nui-French Polynesia, Kanaky-New Caledonia, and Scotland, arguing that domestic constitutional laws in these places are structurally incapable of protecting their rights, and that UN Resolutions 1514 and 1541 serve as the non-negotiable foundation for addressing them.
The real importance of this is procedural rather than rhetorical. The claim now exists as an official archived document of the United Nations, bearing a formal symbol, meaning it can be officially cited, examined, and answered.
HOW THE LIE REACHED THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT
The inquiry
In February 2026 the Scottish Parliament's Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee released a report titled “Options for a legal mechanism for triggering any independence referendum”, which concluded that international law confers no legal right for Scotland to unilaterally secede or to hold a referendum, and that the question must be answered strictly through the so-called United Kingdom's constitutional arrangements.
They reached this unanimous conclusion after hearing from twelve expert witnesses and taking advice from four specialized advisers, all of whom agreed on the point.
Unanimity has a structure
That unanimous agreement deserves a closer look, because it didn't come from an open, independent field of study.
Michael Keating (an adviser) founded the Centre on Constitutional Change at the University of Edinburgh, the hub connecting several of the witnesses, and is a research collaborator with one of them. We know Scottish Universities are under English colonial rule with a very small percentage of Scottish professors who are not free to express their desire for self-determination; otherwise risking their whole career.
Katy Hayward (an adviser) served on a University College London working group chaired by Alan Renwick (a witness); the two co-produced the comparative framework used in the advisers' briefing.
Chris McCorkindale (an adviser) has co-authored published work on constitutional pathways to a second referendum with Aileen McHarg (the witness whose submission featured the exact fake claim this paper examines concerning the UN Charter and the nature of a colony).
Tobias Lock (an adviser) is a Fellow at the same Centre on Constitutional Change.
The web of connections links back to the Centre on Constitutional Change, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, shared Economic and Social Research Council funding, the UCL Constitution Unit, and frequent co-authored publications.
This is not a personal attack or an accusation of bad faith, although we may wonder when a lie is really obvious. It’s a structural issue, echoing what Boaventura de Sousa Santos and decolonial scholars point out about how knowledge is produced. When everyone in a field starts with the exact same analytical baseline, they will naturally produce findings that match it; experiencing the consistency as confirmation and objective proof rather than as circularity.
Every link in this circuit takes the United Kingdom's domestic constitutional framework as the legitimate analytical baseline. Within that restricted, closed baseline the international law of decolonisation is not rejected. It’s simply never in view.
The conclusions were not discovered by an open inquiry. They were the premises the inquiry was assembled from.
What was asserted
When looking at Liberation Scotland's campaign to have Scotland recognized as a NSGT, the counterargument dismisses the effort as speculative on two main grounds:
The Precedent Argument: The United Nations has historically applied the NSGT category exclusively to overseas possessions, never to a historical nation joined by a domestic union. We have shown how wrong and false this statement is in international law and in practice.
The Conventional Status Argument: Scotland has traditionally been viewed as an integral part of the “United Kingdom” rather than a colony, meaning any argument to the contrary relies on a selective and unconventional reading of constitutional history; the typical argument of colonial powers.
The first ground is contradicted by the evidence
This isn’t a matter of open interpretation; it is a factual claim about United Nations practice, and actual UN practice flatly contradicts it.
Every case set out previously answers it: Namibia, East Timor and Western Sahara, each with a land border and each treated as a colonial situation; Gibraltar, listed since 1946, with a land frontier, in Europe, by the same colonial/administering Power that administers Scotland; Ifni; the Portuguese territories, listed over Portugal's constitutional objection; and beyond the register entirely, Oman, Algeria and Palestine.
Any single one of these examples would be enough to disprove the claim. Together, they completely dismantle it.
Despite this, the report cites no legal authorities, leaves Article 73 undiscussed, omits the principles of Resolution 1541, and ignores the crucial gap between Principle IV's presumption and Principle V's substantive test.
The Committee accepted the point without any critical scrutiny, and the Scottish Parliament's publication of it gave the claim the unearned weight of official parliamentary authority.
The second ground assumes the question
Claiming that Scotland has "conventionally been understood" as an integral part of the UK isn't an objective statement of Scotland's actual legal status. It’s just a description of how the colonial, administering power views it. Whether that domestic viewpoint actually decides the matter is the entire question at issue.
Portugal viewed Angola as an integral province.
France viewed Algeria as an overseas département.
Indonesia viewed East Timor as its 27th province.
South Africa viewed South West Africa (Namibia) as its 5th administrative province.
In every single one of these historical cases, the home government's self-serving interpretation was precisely what needed to be examined, and in every single case, the United Nations refused to treat that internal view as legally decisive.
The counter-argument accuses the decolonial position of relying on a selective interpretation of constitutional history, but this completely inverts the burden of proof. It is the committee's submission that treats one specific domestic constitutional narrative as the default baseline that must be accepted.
The decolonial framework, by contrast, argues that the official narrative of the administering power is precisely what needs to be interrogated. That isn't "selectivity" but the standard methodological approach applied to Algeria, Angola, Namibia, and East Timor.
The Quebec categories and the word "former"
The submission relies on the three-category framework from the Reference re Secession of Quebec (1998), which was later partially adopted by the UK Supreme Court in 2022, and asserts that none of those categories apply to Scotland.
The first category is colonial peoples. However, the Supreme Court of Canada provided no geographical definition or gloss for it. Whether Scotland falls under this category is the exact question being debated; a legal framework cannot resolve a dispute simply by being cited as though it had already decided the outcome.
The legal formulation adopted in Reference re Secession of Quebec (1998) contains an explicit logical contradiction by asserting that external self-determination applies to "former colonies." A former colony has, by definition, already exercised self-determination; restricting the right to "former" colonies nullifies the right for existing dependencies. Furthermore, as noted in expert submissions to the Holyrood inquiry (e.g., Prof. André Lecours), the Quebec Reference was an emergency political response by the Canadian federal government following the 1995 referendum, rather than an abstract statement of international law.
Neither Aileen McHarg's nor Dr. Lea Raible's submissions acknowledge this political background.
The UN Special Committee on Decolonization's own international participants have rejected that premise entirely. As the UN seminar records show, colonialism is not a closed chapter.
What the episode demonstrates
A legislative committee examining Scotland's constitutional options accepted an expert legal proposition without challenge; even though it is directly contradicted by the UN Charter, Resolution 1541 read as a whole, and decades of international practice across five continents.
Meanwhile, the organization whose campaign was explicitly named and dismissed in the evidence was given no notice and no right of reply.
This (deliberate) error is common, and that is the core of the problem. The "salt water thesis", the assumption that colonialism only applies to overseas territories separated by oceans, survives not because it holds up under legal defense, but because it is rarely examined at all. It is repeated as basic background, cited to nothing, and used to shut down inquiries before they even begin.
This is what systemic colonial disinformation looks like when it runs long enough. It stops being an argument that needs to be defended and hardens into an unquestioned assumption. It is then reproduced, sometimes in good faith, by the colonized nation's own democratic institutions and stamped with their official authority.
CONCLUSION
The salt water thesis, the persistent claim that colonialism only applies to territories separated from the ruling power by an ocean, is not a rule of international law. It appears nowhere in the UN Charter. It is absent from every operative paragraph of Resolution 1514 and contradicts every principle of Resolution 1541 when read properly.
The doctrine was originally manufactured by states with internal, land-based dependencies, explicitly designed to evade the textual obligations of Article 73. Decades of actual United Nations practice have repeatedly contradicted it.
Key Evidence Against the Thesis
The Register is Not Exhaustive: Oman, Algeria, and Palestine were never formally inscribed on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, yet they were universally recognized as colonial situations. The Special Committee's own seminars confirm that more peoples endure colonization than are officially listed.
Geographic Contiguity is Irrelevant: Namibia, East Timor, Western Sahara, Gibraltar, and Ifni thoroughly dismantle the idea that a land border or lack of an ocean prevents a territory from being colonized.
Domestic Status is Never Decisive: A metropolitan power's self-serving characterization of its own constitution does not block international scrutiny. Kanaky-New Caledonia was reinscribed after forty years of French silence, and French Polynesia after sixty-six years; done without a vote, directly over France's protests.
Decolonization vs. Secession
Decolonization is fundamentally distinct from secession. A people unlawfully held under colonial subordination do not negotiate for the return of sovereignty that was never lawfully surrendered in the first place.
The legal instruments require a substantive, evidence-based inquiry into two core questions:
1. Have the people attained a full measure of self-government?
2. Do the administrative, political, juridical, economic, and historical elements of the relationship place the territory arbitrarily in a position of subordination?
That inquiry cannot be blocked by a geographical assumption, a colonial power's constitutional narrative, or the judgment of that colonial power's own domestic courts.
For Scotland, the threshold objection fails, opening the door to the substantive question. Whether Scotland satisfies Principle V, and whether the 1707 political instruments were validly procured and faithfully performed, are matters to be determined on evidence before competent international organs; not settled by the simple observation that there is no ocean separating Edinburgh from London. We know the evidence is already clear. It must now be validated by the international justice system and the UN.
The decolonisation regime was built precisely so that the constitutional self-description of a metropolitan, colonial state would not be the last word on the rights of the people it administers. A doctrine that restores that last word by drawing a line at the water's edge is not the application of the regime but its reversal. It appears as the coloniser's last surviving rule, still standing inside the body founded to abolish exactly that. Scotland is one of the peoples it was built to keep out; not any more.
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Member discussion