"The Price of Empty Rhetoric": Scotland, Colonial Continuities, Decolonisation and the Crisis of International Law. Sara Salyers at the UN Human Rights Council in March 2026 for Liberation Scotland.

From Rupture to Revelation

At the 61st Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, in March 2026, Liberation Scotland achieved something that decades of devolved politics had conspicuously failed to attempt: it brought Scotland's colonial condition, once again, before the international community with juridical precision, diplomatic seriousness, and the full weight of international law. The intervention delivered by Sara Salyers in Geneva, following her previous intervention at the Palais des Nations in Geneva in September 2025 during Liberation Scotland's historic event on Scotland's right to self-determination under international law organised with the prestigious Hong Kong-based Chinese NGO International Probono Legal Services Association (IPLSA) (Read here for Sara Salyers' 2025 intervention), constitutes not merely an advocacy statement but a juridico-philosophical challenge to the ontology of the so-called rules-based international order. It demands to be read as scholarship, as legal argument, as a precious testimony and as political act simultaneously.

Two distinct but complementary processes unfolded during the week of 16 to 20 March 2026. Their distinction matters. The first was Liberation Scotland's active participation in the HRC61 sessions themselves, including substantive meetings with senior representatives of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the African Union, the European Public Law Organisation, the International Commission of Jurists, and the Permanent Mission of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the UN, all of whom expressed interest in Scotland's case. This was diplomacy conducted within the formal UN architecture, bilateral and multilateral engagement at the highest available level, pursued in the complete absence of any representative from Scotland's devolved administration, which is in fact just Westminter in Scotland. Many colonies had colonial parliaments controlled by the colonial power just like in Scotland today.

The second was a side event held at Geneva's John Knox International Centre, co-sponsored by Liberation Scotland alongside its international partners, the Hong Kong-based International Probono Legal Services Association (IPLSA), Colombia's MALOCA Internationale, and the Indigenous Peoples and Nations Coalition (IPNC). It was at this event, titled "Paying the Price of Empty Rhetoric", that Sara Salyers delivered the paper examined here.

These two tracks must be understood together. The diplomatic engagement within the HRC sessions built the relational architecture. The side event provided the intellectual and legal substance. Connecting both was a document of landmark significance.

Document UN General Assembly A/HRC/61/NGO/210, submitted to the UN Secretary-General and formally circulated within the UN system by IPLSA, an NGO holding special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), in partnership with Liberation Scotland, was registered as an official paper for inclusion in the HRC61 programme and internal UN record. That registration is not procedural detail. It is a threshold event. Scotland's case has been irreversibly transitioned from a domestic "UK" i.e. English colonial state constitutional debate into an international public record, accessible to all 193 UN member states, archived in the permanent documentation of the United Nations. What the English colonial state has spent decades confining within the jurisdiction of Westminster politics has entered a domain that Westminster cannot control.

The Fiction of Order: Reading Carney Against Himself

Salyers opens her argument by anchoring it in a declaration that carries the unusual authority of self-indictment from within the system itself. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in February 2026, Mark Carney, Canadian Prime Minister, acknowledged what decolonial scholarship has established across decades: the asymmetrical enforcement of international law, the structural privilege of dominant states, and the systematic toleration of the gap between normative commitment and political practice. His conclusion was uncharacteristically direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

The invocation of Carney is analytically revealing, and not only for the candour of the admission. His institutional trajectory deserves examination in its own right. Before entering Canadian politics, Carney served as Governor of the Bank of England, an institution whose very name encodes the colonial architecture of "British" financial power with a transparency that the more elaborate fictions of the "United Kingdom" do not always afford. The Bank of England is not a neutral technocratic body. It is the financial nervous system of a state whose imperial accumulation was constructed on the systematic expropriation of colonised peoples across all continents (Williams, 1944; Patnaik, 2018). That Carney spent years presiding over this institution, helping to reproduce the financial order that sustains colonial continuities, before arriving at Davos to mourn the collapse of the very system he helped maintain, is a paradox that illuminates rather than diminishes his usefulness as a witness. He is the system's own voice announcing its failure, from within the biography of its reproduction.

The "rules-based order" Carney now diagnoses as fractured was never, in any meaningful sense, rules-based. It was, as Salyers argues, a discursive apparatus whose normative language provided ideological cover for the continuity of colonial power. What Carney perceives as rupture, decolonial theory identifies as structural revelation. Frantz Fanon warned in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that a world order founded on colonial violence carries within it the enduring seeds of its own delegitimisation. Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism (1950), was even more explicit: the barbarism Europe inflicted upon its colonies was also a rehearsal for the violence it would eventually turn upon itself. Colonialism works to decivilise the coloniser. We can see that in the behaviour of the English colonial state towards Scotland and of English settlers in Scotland.

The crisis Carney laments is not an interruption of the order but that order's logical destination. Carney has now discovered, at the helm of a country that is itself a settler-colonial state, that a system he actively serviced is capable of consuming its own architects. The observation is interesting. The surprise it apparently occasions is more interesting still.

Privative Definition and Colonial Ontology

At the juridical heart of Salyers's argument lies an inversion of remarkable precision. In early 1950s, as the United Nations decolonisation programme gathered momentum and questions were being raised about the constitutional status of Scotland within the emergent UN framework, the British government i.e. the English colonial state created a colonial commission, the Royal Scottish Commission (1952-54), and produced a definition of Scotland's relationship to the Union that was, in retrospect, as damaging as it was defensive. Scotland, the UK state declared, was not a dependency because it had entered the Union with England as a “voluntary partner”.

Salyers identifies this as a privative definition, a form of legal statement whose logical structure is definitionally reversible. If Scotland's non-dependency rests entirely and exclusively on the voluntariness of the partnership, then the demonstration that no voluntary partnership exists is not merely a historical argument. It is a legal threshold that, once crossed, triggers the English colonial state's own definition against itself. Scotland becomes, on the colonial UK's own terms, a dependency, a Non-Self-Governing Territory in the language of the UN Charter.

This epistemic manoeuvre dismantles the ideological shield with which the English colonial state has insulated itself from decolonisation scrutiny. The claim to partnership collapses under empirical and constitutional analysis, revealing instead a structure consistent with classical colonial administration. The Treaty of Union of 1707, under this reading, functions not as an instrument of mutual sovereign recognition but as the characteristic legal instrument of colonial dispossession: a performative artefact whose textual authority is systematically contradicted by material reality.

The substance of that contradiction is constitutional and historical. England's Crown incorporated Scotland as it had incorporated its other imperial territories and continued without interruption; or more exactly, in the case of Scotland, it extended itself over Scotland while preserving the Scottish Crown dormant. No new unitary crown was created, yet a single English crown dominating Scotland was the explicit stated purpose and legal intent of the Treaty; a Treaty which was therefore never implemented in reality. The absence of that crown, never created, never operative, means that no unified kingdom of Great Britain exists in any constitutionally meaningful sense. What exists is the English state, renamed, its juridical personality extended territorially under the cover of a treaty it then failed to honour. The so-called “United Kingdom” is the continuing state of England.

Coloniality, or the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), is not merely a historical condition that concludes with formal legal instruments. It is a matrix of power that persists in the structures of knowledge, education, economy, and governance long after any nominally transformative event. The Treaty of Union performed transformation while enacting continuation. That performance is the colonial act.

Coloniality as Structure: Scotland in Comparative Perspective

Salyers situates Scotland alongside Namibia, East Timor, and the Chagos Archipelago. This is methodological positioning of the kind that comparative colonialism demands. The essential criterion is not geography or cultural proximity but structure: the alienation and annexation of territory without consent, the extraction of resources for the benefit of an external power, the interception of trade and logistics, the suppression of language, culture and political agency, and the systemic production of economic subordination alongside resource wealth.

Scotland satisfies each criterion with an exactitude that should trouble anyone who accepts the comparative framework as legitimate. A quarter of Scottish children live in absolute poverty. Thirty-nine children become homeless every day. Scotland's ports and industries have been systematically relocated to England. Energy produced using Scottish oil, gas, and renewables is sold back to Scottish consumers at the highest prices in the “UK” while revenues flow to the English treasury. These are not historical grievances. They are present conditions, the material signatures of extraction that every colonised people recognises, because extraction is what colonialism does, consistently, structurally, regardless of the particular geography in which it operates.

Understanding that (settler) colonialism is a structure rather than an event is essential here (Wolfe, 2006). Scotland's colonial condition did not conclude in 1707 or in 1745 or in any subsequent moment of formal or informal settlement. It is an ongoing structural relationship reproduced daily through the institutions, financial flows, media, educational and cultural structures, and political arrangements of the English colonial state. The category of colony, applied to Scotland, is not metaphor. It is, as the comparative analysis demands, analytic necessity.

The Chagos precedent carries particular legal weight. The International Court of Justice's 2019 advisory opinion found that the United Kingdom's administration of the Chagos Archipelago constituted an internationally wrongful act and that decolonisation had not been lawfully completed, because the detachment of Chagos from Mauritius before independence was not a free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned (Sands, 2023). Applied to Scotland, where the 1707 Treaty was concluded under conditions of financial coercion, documented bribery of parliamentarians, military threat then military invasion and occupation, and the threat of economic destruction, the structural parallel is legally compelling.

Erga Omnes and the Internationalisation of Scotland's Case

The most legally consequential dimension of Salyers's argument concerns the doctrine of erga omnes obligations, those owed not to any specific bilateral counterpart but to the international community as a whole (Ragazzi, 1997). The International Court of Justice (an institution fully financed and built by Andrew Carnegie, a Scot born in Scotland) in the Barcelona Traction case (1970), defined this category as encompassing fundamental norms whose violation engages the legal interest of all states. In that case, the Court made clear that certain obligations are so essential that all states have a legal interest in their protection, irrespective of direct injury. These obligations include the prohibitions of aggression, genocide, slavery, and racial discrimination, as well as the right of peoples to self-determination. The breach of any such norm is not a confined dispute between parties but an affront to the international legal order itself, activating the entitlement of all states to invoke responsibility.

The repositioning of Scotland's case within this framework has implications that cascade outward. If the alienation of Scottish territory and resources is understood, as confirmed in the Namibia Advisory Opinion (1971), the East Timor judgment (1995), and the Chagos Advisory Opinion (2019), as a violation of self-determination rather than a bilateral constitutional arrangement, then erga omnes obligations follow with legal force: states must not recognise UK claims to Scottish assets or sovereignty, must not provide assistance to the administration of those assets, and may be required to actively support the Scottish people's reassertion of their lawful constitutional authority.

The Scottish Crown carries a significance in this context that requires clarification. It is not a monarchical institution. It is the juridical expression of the Community of the Realm, the collective legal identity and sovereign authority of the Scottish people. Its continued existence, never formally abolished, makes Scotland what Salyers precisely identifies as a stateless but territorially sovereign nation. The resources extracted from Scottish territory are extracted not from a region of England but from a territory whose sovereign ownership was never legally transferred. The erga omnes framework transforms this from a domestic argument into an international legal obligation. (Read Salyer's here on the English colonial state's absence of title in Scotland.)

The primary vehicle for pursuing formal inquiry is a priori the Committee of 24, the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation, through which Liberation Scotland is seeking Scotland's inscription as a recognised Non-Self-Governing Territory (NSGT) i.e. a colony or a dependency. (A priori because Scotland has actually several options given its exceptional status. We will probably come back to that in the future.) The submission of document UN General Assembly A/HRC/61/NGO/210 by IPLSA, in its capacity as an NGO with special consultative status with ECOSOC, in partnership with Liberation Scotland, represents a formal step in that process of internationalisation. Inscription would remove Scotland's case permanently from the jurisdiction of “British” domestic politics and trigger a series of international obligations and protections. The legal question ceases to be whether Scotland desires independence. It becomes whether the international community will honour its own normative commitments.

Absence is not discovered but manufactured, through structures of power that decide what can be seen, named, recognised and accepted (Santos, 2014). The systematic production of Scotland's absence from international decolonisation discourse is not accidental. It is the outcome of an active and consistent English colonial state strategy to maintain the fiction of partnership precisely because the fiction is necessary to prevent the kind of international scrutiny that Liberation Scotland is now forcing. Document UN General Assembly A/HRC/61/NGO/210, notably, breaks that absence. It refuses the epistemicide.

Beyond Independence: Towards Restorative Decolonisation

One of the most intellectually significant contributions of Salyers's argument is its refusal of minimalist decolonisation, the reduction of liberation to the formal transfer of administrative power. This refusal is theoretically grounded and politically essential.

Decolonisation, if it is to constitute genuine liberation rather than what Kwame Nkrumah identified in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) as a transfer of the forms of power while leaving its substance intact, must encompass the restitution of resources, the restoration of cultural and linguistic integrity, the recognition of historical injustice including the erasure of the history of genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Scottish people, and the reconstruction of constitutional authority from the ground of the Community of the Realm upward.

Language is the primary vehicle of colonial domination and its recovery is inseparable from political liberation (Ngũgĩ, 1986), finding direct application in the suppression of Scots and Gaelic and the systematic invitation to Scots to see themselves as British. There is no such thing as “British”, Salyers observes, except as a synonym for “English”. The observation is not polemical. It is constitutionally precise. The construction of Britishness as an identity that Scots can inhabit is the cultural dimension of the colonial project, the internalisation of the coloniser's self-description as one's own.

Mignolo’s idea of the colonial wound points to the lived, historical injury inflicted by colonial domination, not only in economic terms but in memory, identity, history and knowledge (Mignolo, 2007). Maldonado-Torres deepens this through the coloniality of being, which refers to how colonial power structures penetrate existence itself, shaping how people understand their humanity, their worth, their agency and their place in the world (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). In that light, colonialism does not only extract material resources. It colonises subjectivity, producing what Fanon called the inferiority complex of the colonised: the internalised acceptance of one’s own subordination as natural, legitimate, "normal" or permanent.

The recovery of Scotland's history, the reassertion of its languages, the reconstruction of its constitutional tradition, the control of its global representation through control of its foreign policy, are therefore not peripheral cultural or social-political concerns. They are, in the most rigorous theoretical sense, the decolonisation of the mind that must accompany and sustain the decolonisation of the territory.

The Collapse of Rhetoric and the Systemic Crisis

The title of Salyers's paper names both a diagnosis and a prognosis. The international system has sustained itself on a performative commitment to human rights while tolerating, and in many cases actively enabling, structural violations of those rights wherever political convenience demanded.

Each unaddressed case of colonisation, each tolerated annexation, each normalised exception, has contributed to the erosion of the legal universality without which international law risks becoming little more than the projection of power by other means, a concern long identified in critical scholarship on the indeterminacy and power-embedded nature of international law (Koskenniemi, 2005; Anghie, 2005).

The consequences are now visible in their full extent: the selective application of international law calibrated to the identity of perpetrator and victim; the normalisation of territorial annexation with precedents established and then cited by subsequent aggressors; the erosion of institutional legitimacy across the UN system; and the proliferation of conflicts whose perpetrators invoke the very exceptions the system has tolerated. As Salyers states with precision, normalising injustice for one normalises injustice for all. The principle is systemic not sentimental.

Scotland's case transcends its own national boundaries not despite its particularity but because of it. The specificity of the argument, grounded in constitutional history, legal doctrine, political economy and comparative colonial analysis, is precisely what makes it generalisable. If the privative definition argument holds for Scotland, it establishes a method of analysis applicable wherever colonial fictions have been maintained through performative legal instruments contradicted by material reality. If the erga omnes framework applies to Scotland, it reinforces the universality of that doctrine against the selective application that has allowed powerful states to exempt themselves from the obligations they publicly endorse.

Scotland and the Reconstitution of International Law

The work accomplished by Liberation Scotland in Geneva during March 2026 operates on two levels that together constitute a coherent strategic advance. The diplomatic engagement conducted by Liberation Scotland's delegation within the formal HRC sessions, building relationships with the OHCHR, the African Union, the European Public Law Organisation, the International Commission of Jurists, and the Permanent Mission of Venezuela, constructed a relational infrastructure for Scotland's case at the international level. The side event at the John Knox International Center provided the intellectual and legal architecture that gives that case its depth and its durability.

Connecting both, and outlasting both, is document UN General Assembly A/HRC/61/NGO/210, submitted by International Probono Legal Services Association in its capacity as a major Chinese NGO with special consultative status with United Nations Economic and Social Council, giving formal expression within the United Nations system to a body of analysis co-produced by IPLSA and Liberation Scotland (and other partners), and inscribing that shared work into the permanent record.

That document is now accessible to all 193 member states. It cannot be recalled or reclassified as a domestic matter or managed by Westminster. Scotland has entered the international record as a subject of decolonisation law, and the terms of engagement have permanently changed.

The implications are binary and the logic is unsparing. If the international community fails to address Scotland's condition, it affirms that colonial exceptions remain acceptable within the global order and that the rules-based order is, precisely as Carney admitted, a bargain available only to those with the power to exempt themselves from its obligations. If it acts, it signals the beginning of what Salyers calls restorative decolonisation: not the management of colonial legacies but their structural dismantlement, not the granting of independence by an administering power but the recognition by the international community that independence was never the administering power's to grant or withhold.

Decolonisation, as the paper insists, is indivisible. The plea of Scots for justice is a plea for international law as such, for the restoration of a human rights-based order in which the gap between norm and practice is not a managed tolerance but an acknowledged failure demanding remedy. Liberation for one people is inseparable from the restoration of legality for all.

The question is no longer whether the system is failing. The question is whether it retains the capacity, and the will, to correct itself. Sara Salyers delivered that question to Geneva. The record is now international. The silence, if it comes, will also be international. But Scotland will not be silent anymore.

Read Sara Salyers' speech in Geneva (March 2026) here:

Read Liberation Scotland's summary report on Liberation Scotland's participation in the UN Human Rights Council 61st Session in March 2026 in Geneva here.

Read document UN General Assembly A/HRC/61/NGO/210, submitted directly to the UN General Secretary by IPLSA in partnership with Liberation Scotland and accessible to all 193 UN member states, which is publicly accessible through the United Nations document portal here.

Other References:

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Césaire, A. (2000 [1950]). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Crawford, J. (2019). Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law. 9th edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fanon, F. (1963 [1961]). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

International Court of Justice (1970). Case Concerning Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, Ltd (Belgium v Spain), Second Phase, Judgment. ICJ Reports, p. 3.

International Court of Justice (1971). Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970), Advisory Opinion. ICJ Reports, p. 16.

International Court of Justice (1995). Case Concerning East Timor (Portugal v Australia), Judgment. ICJ Reports, p. 90.

International Court of Justice (2019). Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, Advisory Opinion. ICJ Reports, p. 95.

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