06 May 2026 40 min read

The United Nations Has Received the Evidence: Scotland Is a Colony and the World Now Knows It. On Report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210

When the Ground Shifts

There are moments in the history of colonial struggles when the terrain of the contest shifts so completely that the old arguments become not merely insufficient but analytically obsolete. Not just politically inadequate. Categorically superseded. The petitions to Parliament, the electoral mandates, the carefully worded demands for Section 30 Orders: these were never the right instruments for the right arena. They were the colonised institution's attempt to seek freedom through the coloniser's machinery, which is the one machinery guaranteed never to produce it.

Every successful decolonisation movement in history has understood, at some decisive moment, that the path to freedom runs not through the colonial state's constitutional arrangements but through the international community's recognition that a colonial relationship exists and requires remedy.

Namibia understood it when the United Nations revoked South Africa’s mandate over Namibia, declared its continued presence illegal, and the International Court of Justice affirmed in its 1971 advisory opinion that South Africa was under an obligation to withdraw immediately.

East Timor understood it when the United Nations refused to recognise Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor as its constitutionally integrated twenty-seventh province and maintained the territory’s right to self-determination until the 1999 UN-supervised act of popular consultation.

Western Sahara understands it: the United Nations continues to treat the territory as non-self-governing despite Morocco’s insistence that its “Southern Provinces” are constitutionally integral to the Moroccan state.

The Chagos Islands experienced it in 2019 when the International Court of Justice rejected the United Kingdom’s attempt to frame the matter as domestic and held that the decolonisation of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed, requiring the United Kingdom to end its administration of the archipelago.

Kanaky (New Caledonia) understands it: despite its integration within the constitutional order of France, the United Nations reinscribed the territory on the list of non-self-governing territories in 1986 and has continued to supervise its decolonisation process through referendums and international oversight, affirming that domestic constitutional arrangements do not extinguish the right to self-determination. (Kanaky is particularly important for Scotland since the English coloniser through James Cook gave it a Western name meaning Scotland to underline Scotland was an English colony already. We’ll come back to this in the future)

Mā‘ohi Nui (French Polynesia) understands it: the United Nations re-inscribed the territory on the list of non-self-governing territories in 2013, affirming that its status within France does not terminate its right to self-determination under international law and restoring international oversight over its decolonisation process.

Each of these moments shared a common structure: a colonial people's claim escaped the domestic constitutional cage and entered the international legal space where colonial claims are properly adjudicated. The administering power's self-description of the relationship ceased to be the operative legal category. The international community's independent assessment took its place.

Scotland has now experienced its equivalent moment.

In 2025, document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 was submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council's 61st session by IPLSA (International Pro Bono Legal Association), a prominent Chinese civil society organisation with formal consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), in partnership with Liberation Scotland and other partners. The document was received by the UN Secretary-General and registered under UN procedures. It identified Scotland, with legal precision grounded in the UN Charter and General Assembly Resolutions 1514 and 1541, as a territory under English colonial sovereignty. It called for Scotland's automatic listing as a Non-Self-Governing Territory; and demanded international oversight of Scotland's self-determination process. It placed Scotland's colonial claim, for the first time in the modern era, within the formal institutional architecture of the United Nations system.

The character and standing of IPLSA deserves specific attention. As a pro bono legal organisation with ECOSOC consultative status, IPLSA brings to Scotland's case something that no domestic Scottish legal or political institution has been able to provide: formal international legal standing within the UN system, combined with the specific expertise of an organisation whose mandate is the provision of legal support to peoples and communities whose rights are being violated. IPLSA's engagement with Scotland's case is a professional legal assessment that Scotland's condition meets the threshold for international legal intervention; a threshold that IPLSA, as a pro bono legal organisation operating within the UN system, is institutionally equipped to evaluate.

That IPLSA is a Chinese organisation adds a dimension of strategic significance that cannot be overstated. China is not merely a major power. It is a superpower and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; one of the five states whose veto power shapes the most consequential decisions of the international system. China's consistent foreign policy position on self-determination, its history of support for anti-colonial movements across the Global South, and its sustained engagement with the decolonisation framework within UN institutions means that a Chinese organisation's formal legal submission identifying Scotland as a colony carries geopolitical weight with no equivalent. The English colonial state cannot treat the formal engagement of a P5 member's civil society organisation within UN mechanisms as peripheral noise. It is, in diplomatic terms, a signal from within the most powerful tier of the international system that Scotland's colonial claim has achieved institutional credibility at the highest level.

That an organisation of this character, with this mandate, this standing, and this geopolitical significance, chose to submit a document formally identifying Scotland as a colony to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Secretary General is among the most significant legal and diplomatic developments in Scotland's constitutional history. It signals that Scotland's colonial claim has achieved sufficient legal credibility to attract the engagement of serious international legal actors operating within the formal institutional architecture of the United Nations, backed by the geopolitical weight of a permanent Security Council member's civil society presence.

This is not a petition or a campaign. This is not a political manoeuvre. It is a formal legal event whose consequences are now unfolding within the most significant international institution that has ever engaged with Scotland's condition.

This article explains what happened, why it matters, what it means legally, and why the English colonial state cannot undo it.

Why the Organisation That Submitted the Document Matters as Much as the Document Itself

The Architecture of UN Standing

The significance of the report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 cannot be understood without understanding the institutional architecture within which it operates, because the weight of a UN document derives not only from its content but from the standing of the organisation that produced it and the procedures through which it entered the system.

The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations established by the Charter itself. Under Article 71 of the United Nations Charter, ECOSOC is empowered to "make suitable arrangements for consultation with non-governmental organizations which are concerned with matters within its competence". This has generated an elaborate system of NGO consultative status through which civil society organisations from across the world gain formal standing to participate in the UN's deliberative processes (ECOSOC Resolution 1996/31 (25 July 1996), Consultative Relationship between the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organizations).

That standing is not easily obtained. It requires a demonstrated record of work relevant to the UN's mandate, an established organisational structure with a broad international membership base, and passage through a rigorous vetting process conducted by the ECOSOC Committee on NGOs. As of 2024, approximately 6,000-6,500 NGOs hold consultative status with ECOSOC, out of the many thousands of civil society organisations worldwide that might seek such recognition. This status constitutes a significant form of institutional access, enabling accredited organisations to engage directly with UN processes, submit written contributions, participate in deliberations, and contribute to the shaping of international norms and agendas across a wide range of policy areas.

An NGO with ECOSOC consultative status can submit written statements to the Human Rights Council, participate in briefings and side events at UN Geneva and New York, interact with UN Special Rapporteurs and treaty bodies, and; most importantly for Scotland's case; submit reports and documentation that enter the formal UN record and are received by the Secretary-General. When such an organisation submits a document arguing that a specific territory constitutes a colony in breach of the UN Charter, that document is not a political pamphlet. It is a formal contribution to the UN's deliberative processes by an entity that the United Nations system has formally recognised as a legitimate participant in those processes. It is in the record. It cannot be unregistered or dismissed as unofficial. It is, in the most precise institutional sense, there; especially when it is submitted by a major Chinese NGO.

IPLSA and the Geopolitics of Scotland's Claim

IPLSA; the International Pro Bono Legal Association; is a prominent Chinese civil society organisation based in Hong Kong, China, with formal ECOSOC consultative status at the United Nations, engaged with the UN human rights and decolonisation systems. Its character as a pro bono legal organisation is significant: this is not a general advocacy body but an organisation whose specific mandate is the provision of legal support to peoples and communities whose rights are being violated under international law. That mandate shapes the significance of its engagement with Scotland's case, an illegally annexed nation by the English colonial state. IPLSA does not take up causes for political gesture. It assesses whether a legal claim meets the threshold for international legal intervention and commits its institutional resources accordingly. Its submission of document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 is therefore a professional legal judgment that Scotland's colonial condition meets that threshold.

The organisation is chaired by Junius Ho Kwan-yiu, a prominent Hong Kong legislator and member of the National People's Congress of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Ho's chairmanship of IPLSA is geopolitically significant for Scotland’s liberation from the English coloniser. As a National People's Congress member, Ho occupies a position within China's highest legislative body and brings to IPLSA's work the institutional weight and international networks that this position carries. His engagement with Scotland's self-determination claim through IPLSA's UN submission is not the intervention of a peripheral civil society figure. It is the engagement of a legislator with significant standing within the Chinese political system, choosing to deploy an internationally recognised legal organisation's ECOSOC status in support of Scotland's decolonisation claim. This is a strategic choice of considerable geopolitical significance.

The People's Republic of China has maintained, as a matter of consistent foreign policy across decades, that the self-determination principles of the UN Charter apply universally; including to territories within or adjacent to European states. China was a consistent supporter of anti-colonial movements during the Cold War period, from Vietnam to Angola to Zimbabwe, and its engagement with decolonisation questions through civil society channels represents a continuation of that tradition within the contemporary institutional framework (Alden, 2007; Taylor, 2006). China's position at the UN Security Council; where it holds permanent membership and veto power; means that its civil society organisations' engagement with Scotland's decolonisation claim carries diplomatic implications that extend beyond the Human Rights Council's institutional architecture. An ECOSOC-status organisation chaired by a National People's Congress member engaging formally with Scotland's colonial status is a signal to the international community that carries weight beyond the procedural; especially since China is now a highly respected and successful global superpower.

The decision of an organisation of IPLSA's character and standing to submit a document formally identifying Scotland as a territory under English colonial sovereignty to the UN Secretary General and the UN Human Rights Council is therefore not merely procedurally significant. It is geopolitically significant at the highest level; signalling that Scotland's colonial claim has achieved sufficient international legal credibility to attract the engagement of serious legal actors operating with significant institutional and political backing within the formal UN system. Major powers do not deploy organisations of this kind within UN mechanisms to advance claims that lack legal substance. The submission is itself evidence of the legal credibility of Scotland's case; especially since China is now the smartest power on earth with the best research ecosystem and knowledge production.

The pairing of IPLSA with Liberation Scotland is strategically deliberate. It brings together an organisation with formal UN standing, pro bono legal expertise, and the institutional backing of significant Chinese political figures, with Scotland’s liberation movement, which is also a Scottish civil society organisation that has produced the systematic legal and historical documentation of Scotland's colonial status on which document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 draws. The collaboration represents exactly the kind of alliance between international institutional capacity and colonised peoples' advocacy that the decolonisation movement has historically relied upon to apply international pressure to administering powers like the English colonial state: the colonised people's own analysis and evidence, supported by the institutional resources and international standing of actors whose engagement the colonial state cannot dismiss as peripheral.

For readers across the Global South who have experienced precisely this dynamic in their own liberation movements, the structure is immediately recognisable. The colonised people’s movement, insufficient on its own to overcome the administering power’s institutional dominance in the domestic arena, finds international allies whose engagement shifts the terrain of the contest from the colonial state’s constitutional machinery to the international system’s independent assessment. This is how Namibia’s claim was sustained across decades of South African control: the United Nations terminated the mandate, declared South Africa’s continued presence illegal, and the International Court of Justice confirmed in 1971 that South Africa was under an obligation to withdraw, while recognising the legitimacy of the Namibian people’s struggle for self-determination. This sustained internationalisation of the question ensured that Namibia’s status could not be reduced to a domestic constitutional matter and ultimately paved the way for independence in 1990. This is how Western Sahara’s claim remains on the international agenda despite Morocco’s insistence on its constitutional integration. This is how Scotland's claim, placed formally before the UN system through the combined efforts of IPLSA and Liberation Scotland, has escaped the domestic constitutional cage that SP Paper 1030* and organisations like These Islands** were designed to maintain.

The English colonial state cannot dismiss the engagement of an organisation originating the People’s Republic of China as a superpower, chaired by a China National People's Congress member, operating with ECOSOC consultative status, submitting formal legal documentation to the UN Human Rights Council, as the work of peripheral or uninformed actors. That dismissal, which served the colonial state well when Scotland's international campaign was less institutionally embedded, is no longer available. The institutional weight of IPLSA's engagement, combined with the legal precision of document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210's analysis, has placed Scotland's colonial claim in the international record in a form that the colonial state's domestic constitutional machinery cannot reach.

The Human Rights Council's 61st Session: What "In the System" Means

Report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 was submitted to the Human Rights Council's 61st session. The United Nations Human Rights Council, established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 60/251 in 2006 as the successor to the Commission on Human Rights, is the principal intergovernmental body within the United Nations system responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide.

A document submitted by an ECOSOC-status organisation from a major Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, received by the Secretary-General, and registered under UN procedures occupies a specific institutional position: it is in the UN system and part of the formal record. It is searchable and citable. It is available to UN Special Rapporteurs, treaty bodies, Committee of 24 members, and member state governments. It cannot be withdrawn without the submitting organisation's consent.

The significance of this for Scotland is concrete and immediate. A document now exists in the official UN record that formally identifies Scotland as a territory under English colonial sovereignty and calls for the activation of the UN decolonisation framework and listing of Scotland as an English colony by the UN. Every subsequent interaction between the Scottish Parliament, the UK Government, or the international community with the question of Scotland's constitutional status occurs against the background of that document's existence. The English colonial state can no longer pretend, to the international community, that Scotland's constitutional question has not been placed formally before the UN system. It has been. The fact is permanent. It is part of the international record.

What the Document Establishes: Scotland's Colonial Status Under International Law

The Three Instruments and Why They Apply

Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 grounds its analysis in the three foundational instruments of the UN decolonisation framework: Article 73 of the UN Charter, General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) of 1960, and General Assembly Resolution 1541 (XV) of 1960. These are the instruments that the international community developed specifically to identify and address colonial domination, and their application to Scotland is the central analytical act of the document.

Article 73 of the UN Charter establishes the duty of states administering "territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government" to develop self-government, take due account of the political aspirations of those peoples, and transmit regular information about those territories to the Secretary-General. The critical point; and the point that the English colonial state has relied upon for seventy years to exclude Scotland from the UN's decolonisation architecture; is that Article 73 does not specify that such territories must be geographically separated from the administering power by a body of water. The geographical test, the so-called "salt water doctrine" or "blue water thesis”, was a political position adopted by metropolitan powers, not a legal requirement codified in the Charter's text. The Charter speaks of peoples who have not attained self-government. It does not speak of oceans; as seen in the decolonisation cases of Namibia or East Timor.

General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV); the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, adopted in 1960 at the high tide of African decolonisation; establishes that "the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights, contrary to the Charter of the United Nations". It declares that all peoples have the right to self-determination and establishes, with a categorical force that admits no qualification, that "inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness shall never serve as a pretext for delaying independence". Read that sentence again. Never. No level of alleged preparedness or unpreparedness can justify delay. This is particularly valid in Scotland’s case given that the English colonial state’s propaganda apparatus keeps saying Scotland is not ready, is too wee and too poor. All complete lies; and illegal in international law. The "settled will" concept orchestrated by the English colonial state and deployed throughout Scotland's domestic constitutional debate; the indefinitely deferred threshold that must be demonstrated to the colonial establishment's satisfaction before Scotland may decide its future; is precisely the pretext that Resolution 1514 prohibits. It is colonial management of aspiration dressed in constitutional language, and international law has explicitly prohibited it.

General Assembly Resolution 1541 (XV) operationalises these principles by specifying the factual conditions under which a territory is to be recognised as non-self-governing. There are three cumulative conditions: a distinct people with a separate historical, cultural, and geographic identity; the absence of a full measure of self-government over fundamental political authority; and incorporation without free and genuine consent. Report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 establishes that Scotland satisfies all three.

Check our previous post on how Scotland Qualifies as a Colony Under United Nations Law.

Condition One: Scotland Is a Distinct People

On the first condition, the evidence is overwhelming and effectively uncontested even by the English colonial state.

Scotland is among Europe's oldest continuous nations, recognised for centuries in international law and diplomacy as a sovereign state with its own monarchy, parliament, ecclesiastical settlement, legal system, and foreign relations. Scotland has the oldest flag in Europe. Scots law; a hybrid of Roman-Dutch civil law and indigenous common law; remains distinct from the English common law tradition and is preserved within the colonial devolution settlement, being a part of the colonial and never fully implemented colonial so-called “Treaty of Union”. Although highly suppressed by the English colonial state, the Gaelic and Scots linguistic traditions constitute a cultural inheritance entirely separate from England's. Scotland's literary, philosophical, academic and intellectual history forms a distinct national culture with international standing that long predates the 1707 annexation.

The document directly engages the “British” constitutional narrative that the 1706-1707 Treaty and Acts of Union created a new state from two equal partners and rejects it with precision. The Treaty and Acts of Union dissolved the institutions of the Scottish state while leaving those of England structurally intact. As Robert Black KC as demonstrated with Liberation Scotland, the English Crown, Parliament, and constitutional doctrine continued unbroken. England did not merge with Scotland. England absorbed Scotland. Lord Cooper, Lord President of the Court of Session, stated this with uncommon clarity in MacCormick v Lord Advocate (1953 SC 396): "the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law." The English constitutional tradition swallowed the Scottish one. This is annexation, not merger. The first condition is satisfied beyond any serious legal dispute.

Condition Two: Scotland Lacks Full Self-Government

On the second condition, document A/HRC/61/NGO/210 of the United Nations Human Rights Council deploys, with characteristic irony, the English colonial state's own highest court as its most authoritative witness. The UK Supreme Court ruled in Reference by the Lord Advocate of devolution issues under paragraph 34 of Schedule 6 to the Scotland Act 1998 [2022] UKSC 31 that the Scottish Parliament lacks the competence to legislate for an independence referendum, even where a majority of its members support doing so. The court stated, in terms, that "the principle of self-determination is simply not in play here." A clear violation of Scotland’s right to self-determination under international law; precisely the title of Liberation Scotland’s 18 September 2025 conference at the UN General Office in Geneva organised with IPLSA also.

This statement requires careful legal characterisation. Under the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), adopted by the International Law Commission in 2001 and endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 56/83; the authoritative framework governing state responsibility in international law; the domestic characterisation of a question of international law is governed by international law rather than by the legal system of the state whose authority is at issue (ARSIWA, Article 3). The colonial court's dismissal of Scotland's self-determination claim is legally irrelevant as a determination of Scotland's international legal status. It tells us what the English colonial state's highest court thinks. It does not tell us what international law says.

The practical evidence of Scotland's absent self-government is comprehensive. Scotland cannot amend the Scotland Act under which its Parliament operates. Its budget is determined substantially by a Westminster block grant. Its legislative competence was curtailed by the UK Internal Market Act 2020 without its democratic consent; the Scottish Parliament explicitly refused approval through a Legislative Consent Motion, and was overridden. Its legislation has been blocked by Section 35 order, an instrument never deployed in devolution's history until the colonial state chose to use it against Scottish gender recognition reform. Nuclear weapons of mass destruction are stationed at Faslane against the consistently expressed democratic will of the Scottish Parliament. In numerous countries, British diplomatic missions formally and officially identify themselves as "the English Embassy"; an act of nomenclature that performs the erasure of Scottish national identity in the international arena, precisely the kind of international invisibility that defines the absence of full self-government under Resolution 1541. “Britain” or the “UK” has always meant the English colonial state in disguise.

The second condition is satisfied.

Condition Three: The 1707 Annexation Was Not Consensual

On the third condition, report United Nations Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 engages the historical record of 1707 with a precision that demolishes the Anglo-British state constitutional narrative of “voluntary union”.

A foundational principle of international law applies here with particular force. Intertemporal law requires that each stage of a territorial or constitutional claim be evaluated against the legal norms operative at the relevant time; and critically, that the evolution of international law since 1945 retroactively interrogates earlier arrangements. Self-determination possesses a uniquely retroactive quality, designed precisely to address historical injustices embedded in colonial formations. The 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration, the 1960 Declarations on decolonisation, and the UN Charter do not merely govern future colonial relationships. They reach back and recharacterise arrangements concluded under coercion and fraud as the wrongful acts they always were. To apply this retroactive logic to the Falklands and the Chagos Islands while denying it to Scotland is to suspend intertemporal reasoning at precisely the point where it becomes politically inconvenient for the English colonial state. Applied consistently, intertemporal law requires that the 1707 Union be assessed not only against the legal standards of its own time; under which coercion and bribery already vitiated consent; but against the evolved international legal order that has since confirmed those standards with binding doctrinal precision.

England's strategic and colonial objective was transparent and has been extensively documented. Scotland carried minimal national debt compared to England, whose fiscal position had been severely strained by the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession, necessitating the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 specifically to manage an accumulating debt burden that threatened the English state's financial stability (Devine, 1999; Whatley, 2006). Securing access to Scotland's fiscal and commercial resources, eliminating a potentially hostile northern flank exploitable by France, and expanding the English tax base to service these war debts were the material imperatives driving London's pursuit of union. Scotland was not a weakened state seeking rescue. It was a target selected for absorption on strategic and fiscal grounds.

England deliberately engineered Scotland's commercial ruin through the undermining of the Darien venture and the economic sanctions of the Alien Act 1705, an act that threatened to classify all Scots as aliens in England and sever trade between the two countries unless Edinburgh accepted union on London's terms. We must note, and we will come back to that in the future, that the Darien scheme was an attempt to establish a trading post, sabotaged by the English colonial state, and did not bankrupt Scotland at all, contrary to what English state propaganda propagates. English naval vessels entered the Firth of Forth. English troops were positioned at the border. Westminster's own records confirm that orders for military engagement were prepared. Cash payments, titles, pensions, and sinecures were systematically distributed to members of the Scottish Parliament in exchange for their votes in favour of union, a process documented in archives that the English colonial state has never successfully repudiated.

Daniel Defoe, employed as an English intelligence agent in Edinburgh during the union negotiations and therefore a primary rather than hostile source, reported that popular opposition to union was overwhelming. Robert Burns memorialised what international law would later confirm: "We're bought and sold for English gold, such a parcel of rogues in a nation." The Scottish population rioted in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and across the country when the union was announced. The Parliament that ratified the Treaty held no popular mandate for doing so in any sense recognisable to modern democratic theory or to the standards of free and genuine consent required by Resolution 1541.

An agreement produced by the deliberate destruction of the other party's economy and commercial ambitions, by military threat then full military invasion, and by the systematic bribery and manipulation of the decision-making institution is not a voluntary union in any sense that international law recognises. It is annexation. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), Article 49, establishes that a state induced to enter an agreement by the fraudulent conduct of the other negotiating party may invoke the fraud as invalidating its consent. The principle applies with even greater force to a domestic legislative body purchased with the other party's money. The third condition is satisfied.

The Legal Conclusion

With all three conditions of Resolution 1541 satisfied, report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 reaches the conclusion that the framework requires: Scotland qualifies as a Non-Self-Governing Territory within the meaning of Article 73 of the UN Charter and should be listed as such by the UN; and is entitled to the full protections and processes of the decolonisation framework under Resolution 1514.

The document establishes a further principle of fundamental importance: time does not cure colonial status. The UN monitors territories incorporated over many generations. Three centuries of colonial administration do not transform annexation into legitimate partnership. Colonial status persists until it is resolved through genuine self-determination; not through a managed advisory consultation designed and controlled by the administering power, but through a free and genuine expression of the colonised people's will under internationally recognised conditions. The 2014 referendum (non-binding, conducted under a colonial franchise, with the full institutional weight of the British state deployed against independence, and without binding legal effect) does not constitute genuine self-determination within the meaning of Resolution 1514. It constitutes exactly the kind of managed colonial consultation that the decolonisation framework was built to challenge.

Devolution as Legal Assimilation: The Most Devastating Analytical Contribution

Beyond the Constitutional Illusion

The most analytically significant contribution of the report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 to the international legal framework for Scotland's decolonisation is its characterisation of devolution; not as a transfer of meaningful self-governance, but as an instrument of legal assimilation. A mechanism through which the English colonial centre maintains overriding authority while projecting the illusion of self-government. A sophisticated technology of colonial management dressed in the language of democratic progress.

This characterisation challenges a framing that has been reproduced not only by the UK Government but by many Scottish independence supporters who regard the devolved settlement as an improvement on what preceded it without questioning its fundamental character as a colonial administrative arrangement. Devolution is a colonial instrument. The apparent improvement of colonial conditions does not transform their colonial character. The colonial administration of India improved certain infrastructure conditions. This did not make the Raj less colonial. When we study French colonialism, we observe a recurring pattern in which apparent “improvements” function not as genuine decolonisation, but as adaptive mechanisms designed to preserve the colonial order under altered historical conditions.

The document situates devolution within a framework of what it identifies as "hegemonic legal pluralism", drawing on Mignolo's analysis of the "colonial difference" (Mignolo, 2000): the structural asymmetry between a colonial centre that defines the terms of legitimate political existence and a colonial periphery that is permitted to organise its social life within those terms but never to challenge the terms themselves and the underlying structure of authority.

The Scottish Parliament can organise NHS Scotland. It can apparently develop distinctive educational policy (although Scotland cannot control its universities and what history and languages are taught in schools). It can administer Scottish civil law (with increasing English interventionism overtime in violation of the so-called Treaty of Union)). What it absolutely cannot do; what it is constitutionally forbidden to do; is challenge the colonial framework within which it operates, initiate any process toward independence, or survive a Westminster decision to curtail or abolish it. The permitted sphere is the sphere the colonial centre has chosen to permit. The prohibited sphere is defined by the colonial centre's interests. This is not self-governance. This is colonial administration through the appearance of local autonomy. It is simply an English colonial scam.

The constitutional evidence for this characterisation is provided by the SP Paper 1030* report itself; a document with an undeniable colonial function in support of the English colonial state’s continued subjugation of Scotland. The report acknowledges at paragraph 104 that "in the absence of [Westminster] agreement there is no pathway for the people of Scotland to exercise their democratic right to determine Scotland's constitutional future". Imagine that. That single admission; reproduced without apparent awareness that it describes a colonial structure; establishes that devolution does not constitute self-governance in any sense that the UN decolonisation framework recognises. A people that cannot initiate any lawful process towards determining its own constitutional future is a colonised people, regardless of how extensive its administrative autonomy in other domains may appear.

The Scotland Act's Constitutional Self-Destruction

Report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 further identifies the Scotland Act 1998 specifically as an instrument of legal assimilation whose constitutional character is evidenced by a structural absurdity that the colonial establishment has never successfully resolved.

Section 37 of the Scotland Act 1998 purports to subordinate the Acts of Union to the provisions of the Scotland Act 1998 by providing that the Union with Scotland Act 1706 and the Union with England Act 1707 “have effect subject to this Act.” A Westminster statute claims priority over the treaty instruments from which Westminster itself derives its claimed constitutional authority in Scotland. The creature claims dominion over its creator. This is a logical impossibility: if the Acts of Union are the constitutional foundation of the UK Parliament, that Parliament cannot subordinate them to its own later enactments. If they are not the constitutional foundation, then the UK has no legitimate constitutional basis for its authority in Scotland. Either way, the Scotland Act's claim to determine the limits of Scottish political agency is constitutionally defective.

This constitutional impossibility is the colonial logic of the Scotland Act made visible. The colonial administration defines the limits of the colonised institution's authority, derives that definition from an instrument it simultaneously claims to supersede, and presents the resulting circular self-authorisation as constitutional law. It is not constitutional law. It is colonial administration asserting its own legitimacy through instruments that, when examined carefully, cancel themselves.

State Responsibility and the Ongoing Wrongful Act: The ARSIWA Framework Applied to Scotland

The International Law Commission's Most Powerful Instrument

The Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), adopted by the International Law Commission in 2001 and endorsed by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 56/83, represent the most authoritative codification of customary international law on state responsibility. While document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 identifies Scotland's colonial condition and calls for decolonisation remedies grounded in the UN Charter and Resolutions 1514 and 1541, the ARSIWA framework establishes the specific legal consequences of that condition for the English colonial state's international responsibility, with considerable and immediate significance.

Article 3 establishes the foundational principle: "The characterisation of an act of a State as internationally wrongful is governed by international law. Such characterisation is not affected by the characterisation of the same act as lawful by internal law." This principle directly overrides the entire apparatus of UK domestic law (the Scotland Act, the UK Supreme Court ruling, Westminster parliamentary sovereignty) as a determination of Scotland's international legal status. The character of the colonial relationship is determined by international law. The UK state may not characterise its relationship with Scotland as a voluntary constitutional partnership under domestic law and expect that characterisation to be accepted as dispositive by the international community.

Article 4 establishes that the conduct of any state organ (legislative, executive, or judicial) is attributable to the state under international law. The UK Supreme Court's 2022 ruling, including its statement that "the principle of self-determination is simply not in play here", is an act of the UK state under international law. Under Article 3, its domestic characterisation of Scotland's self-determination claim does not determine Scotland's international legal status. It is the colonial state's judicial organ telling the colonised people that the foundational principle of their liberation does not apply to them. International law does not accept that self-description as the operative legal category.

Article 14 is the most practically significant provision for Scotland's situation: "the breach of an international obligation by an act of a State having a continuing character extends over the entire period during which the act continues and remains not in conformity with the international obligation". England's colonial relationship with Scotland, constituting as it does an internationally wrongful act, is a continuing breach. The wrongfulness is not historical. It is ongoing. Each day that the Scottish people are denied their right to determine their constitutional future through a free and genuine self-determination process is a further continuation of the same internationally wrongful act. Time does not normalise the wrong. It extends the period for which the responsible state must account.

Articles 30, 31, and 32 establish the legal consequences that follow where an internationally wrongful act is found to exist. The responsible state is required to cease the wrongful act if it is continuing and to make full reparation for the injury caused, including both material and moral damage. And it cannot rely on its internal law (the Scotland Act, the parliamentary sovereignty doctrine, the Supreme Court's ruling) as justification for failure to comply with its international obligations. Article 32 is categorical on this point: internal law provides no shield against international legal responsibility.

The Jus Cogens Dimension and Member State Obligations

The ARSIWA framework generates consequences that extend beyond the bilateral relationship between Scotland and the English colonial state. The right to self-determination is a jus cogens norm; a peremptory norm of international law from which no derogation is permitted and an obligation erga omnes owed to the international community as a whole. The International Court of Justice identified obligations erga omnes in the Barcelona Traction judgment (ICJ, 1970), while the Court’s subsequent jurisprudence explicitly affirmed the centrality of self-determination in cases such as East Timor (ICJ, 1995) and Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (ICJ, 2004).

Under Articles 40 and 41 of the International Law Commission’s ARSIWA, a serious breach of a jus cogens norm is defined as a gross or systematic failure by a state to fulfil an obligation arising under a peremptory norm of general international law. In such circumstances, all states are under an obligation to cooperate to bring the breach to an end through lawful means and are prohibited from recognising as lawful any situation created by that breach.

Applied to Scotland: if Scotland's colonial condition constitutes a serious breach of the jus cogens norm of self-determination, then all UN member states are under an international legal obligation to cooperate in ending that breach and are prohibited from recognising the UK's constitutional claim over Scotland as lawful to the extent that claim is maintained in violation of Scotland's right to self-determination.

This is not a claim that Scotland's independence is already achieved or that member states must immediately recognise an independent Scottish state. It is a claim that the international community has positive obligations with respect to Scotland's self-determination that are activated by the recognition of Scotland's colonial status. Obligations that go beyond passive acknowledgement. Obligations that require active cooperation in ensuring that Scotland's right to self-determination is genuinely, freely, and fairly exercised.

The Colonial History the Document Places Before the United Nations

What SP Paper 1030 Refused to Examine

Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 does not merely assert Scotland's colonial status in abstract legal terms. It documents some of the colonial markers that establish Scotland's condition with historical and empirical specificity; the markers that Liberation Scotland has documented in detail and that the Scottish Parliament's SP Paper 1030 inquiry systematically excluded from consideration, because examining them would have destroyed the foundational claim of the entire exercise.

The Highland Clearances constitute ethnic cleansing and genocide by the definition that international law applies to the terms. It is a colonial atrocity to be placed, as the document does, formally before the United Nations as evidence of the character of the relationship. The suppression of the Gaelic language through institutional force constitutes linguicide comparable to the cultural destruction carried out by colonial powers across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Ireland. The educational model used to destroy Gaelic was explicitly described by its own administrators as a prototype for what would later be deployed in global colonial settings. This is not parallel to colonialism. This is colonialism.

The McCrone Report; a 1974 government economic analysis concluding that North Sea oil revenues would give an independent Scotland one of the strongest currencies in Europe; was classified secret for thirty years by successive UK governments. Former Labour Chancellor Denis Healey later admitted the oil's value was deliberately downplayed "because of the threat of Scottish nationalism" (Healey, 2006). This is colonial information suppression: the systematic concealment from a colonised people of knowledge that would materially affect their political choices and their assessment of their own viability as an independent state. Norway discovered North Sea oil at the same time. It built a sovereign wealth fund now worth trillions of pounds. Scotland has nothing equivalent, because the administering power managed Scotland's natural resources for metropolitan benefit while suppressing the evidence that would have revealed the cost.

The imposition of nuclear weapons at Faslane, placing the colonised population within thirty miles of weapons of mass destruction for the strategic benefit of the colonial centre, and the extraction of North Sea revenues as "extra-regio" resources removed from Scottish national accounts, complete the picture of a colonial relationship bearing every marker that the international community has historically recognised as requiring decolonisation. Liberation Scotland's colonial markers can be read on its website directly.

The 1950s Misrepresentation: Fraud at the Foundation

What may be the most legally significant dimension of Scotland's relationship with the UN decolonisation framework is the misrepresentation made by the UK Government to the United Nations in the 1950s, when the UN undertook its systematic review of non-self-governing territories.

The UK Government represented to the international community that the United Kingdom was a unitary state composed of equal and co-founding partners, that Scotland had entered a voluntary union and was a constituent nation of equal standing rather than a dependency, and that it therefore lay outside the decolonisation framework. The timing of the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs, established in 1952 and reporting in 1954, is not coincidental. This was precisely the period during which the UN was constructing the decolonisation framework, adopting Resolution 1541, and reviewing which territories qualified for non-self-governing status and international oversight. Colonial powers do not establish Royal Commissions examining the adequacy of their constitutional relationships with constituent territories by accident during the period when the UN is determining which territories require decolonisation oversight. The Balfour Commission's function was to produce the institutional and documentary evidence that Scotland's governance arrangements reflected voluntary partnership rather than colonial dependency; providing the political and administrative cover for the UK's representations to the UN that Scotland required no decolonisation oversight. It produced exactly the conclusions the colonial state required: that Scotland's arrangements within the Union were adequate and appropriate, that no fundamental constitutional imbalance existed, and that the relationship with Westminster reflected willing participation rather than subordination.

This representation was accepted without scrutiny. The Cold War geopolitical context, the network of British diplomatic relationships, the absence of organised Scottish advocacy at the international level meant the claim went unexamined. Scotland was excluded from the decolonisation process not because it failed to meet the legal criteria for NSGT status but because the administering power successfully misrepresented its character, deploying a purpose-built Royal Commission as the institutional instrument of that misrepresentation.

Misrepresentation in international law may invalidate the legal effect of an arrangement procured through it. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), Article 49, establishes that fraud invalidates consent. If Scotland's exclusion from the UN decolonisation framework was procured by fraudulent misrepresentation of Scotland's status; including through the strategic deployment of the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs to present colonial administration as voluntary partnership; that exclusion is legally defective and the question is properly before the international community for fresh examination. Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 constitutes precisely that fresh examination. By placing Scotland's colonial condition formally before the UN system, it reintroduces the evidence that was excluded from the 1950s review, documents what the UK Government concealed, and demands the independent international scrutiny that the UK Government's diplomatic network successfully prevented at that time.

The concealment lasted seventy years. It has now ended.

The Salt Water Doctrine: How the English Colonial State Invented a Non-Existent Legal Principle

A Political Position Dressed as International Law

The primary legal argument deployed to exclude Scotland from the decolonisation framework is the colonially fabricated "salt water doctrine" or "blue water thesis"; the position that colonial relationships, to engage the UN decolonisation framework, must involve geographic separation between the colonised territory and the administering power by a body of water.

This doctrine has never been formally codified as binding international law. Article 73 of the UN Charter does not contain the word "overseas". Resolution 1541 (XV) does not make geographic separation a legal condition of non-self-governing status. The doctrine was a political position adopted by metropolitan powers; primarily the UK/England, France, Portugal, and Spain; to prevent the application of the decolonisation framework to their contiguous colonial territories. It was contested from its inception by anti-colonial scholars and states, and has been progressively undermined by UN practice in ways that are now beyond serious legal dispute.

Indonesia constitutionally integrated East Timor as its 27th province, argued the matter was therefore domestic, and the UN rejected that characterisation and maintained East Timor as a non-self-governing territory for twenty-four years until a UN-supervised independence referendum was held in 1999. Morocco describes Western Sahara as its "Southern Provinces", argues the territory is constitutionally integrated, and the UN continues to treat it as a non-self-governing territory pending genuine self-determination. The ICJ's 2019 advisory opinion in Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 established that the decolonisation process had not been lawfully completed and that the UK was under an obligation to bring it to conclusion, overriding UK insistence that the matter was bilateral and domestic (ICJ, 2019).

In every case, the administering power argued its constitutional characterisation of the territory's status was dispositive. In every case, the international community rejected that argument and applied the decolonisation framework regardless. The principle is now settled: the administering power's domestic constitutional description of a territory's status cannot override the international community's independent assessment.

This matters directly for one of the most consequential claims made within the Scottish Parliament's SP Paper 1030 inquiry. Professor Aileen McHarg; whose co-authorship with committee adviser Chris McCorkindale on constitutional pathways to a second independence referendum creates a structural conflict of interest; asserted in her submission for SP Paper 1030 that the UN has never applied the category of non-self-governing territory to anything other than overseas possessions. This statement is factually false. East Timor, Namibia and Western Sahara demonstrate its falseness beyond dispute. Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210's formal presence in the UN system provides the most authoritative available refutation: the UN system has now received a document applying precisely the framework McHarg claimed had never been applied, identifying Scotland alongside French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Okinawa as a territory under colonial sovereignty for which domestic constitutional arrangements are structurally incapable of protecting its rights. The disinformation has been formally answered by the institution whose practice it misrepresented.

The Process That Has Now Begun

The Committee of 24 and the Fourth Committee

With document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 formally in the UN system, the question for Liberation Scotland and for the international community is what formal recognition process now follows. The decolonisation framework provides specific institutional pathways through which Scotland's NSGT claim can be advanced.

The Special Committee on Decolonisation or Committee of 24 (C-24) is the UN body established by General Assembly Resolution 1654 (XVI) in 1961 specifically to oversee the implementation of Resolution 1514. Its mandate includes monitoring the Declaration on Decolonisation's implementation, reviewing the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, and hearing petitions from peoples of non-self-governing territories.

Liberation Scotland has already addressed the Committee of 24 directly making Scotland the first European nation to formally address the UN's principal decolonisation body in the modern era. Liberation Scotland's representatives have also addressed the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly, further embedding Scotland's claim within the institutional architecture of the UN decolonisation system.

Liberation Scotland has already addressed the C-24 directly; making Scotland the first European nation to formally address the UN's principal decolonisation body in the modern era. Deploying a strategically deliberate approach, Liberation Scotland was invited by the representatives of Kanaky (New Caledonia), Mā'ohi Nui (French Polynesia), and Western Sahara to address the Committee on their behalf; sister colonised peoples whose formally recognised NSGT status provides the institutional entry point through which Liberation Scotland has embedded itself within the UN decolonisation system. This is not a peripheral manoeuvre. It is the opening of a door: by establishing Liberation Scotland's presence and credibility within the Committee of 24's proceedings as a voice invited by recognised non-self-governing peoples, the groundwork is laid for Scotland's own claim to be heard within that same institutional space. Liberation Scotland's representatives have also addressed the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly or C-4, and Liberation Scotland has convened two major international conferences in Geneva; on 18 September 2025 at the United Nations Office and in March 2026 at the John Knox International Center; bringing together legal experts, UN officials, and representatives of colonised peoples to advance Scotland's decolonisation claim within the formal architecture of the international system. These are not gestures. They are juridical and diplomatic acts whose cumulative weight is now part of the UN's institutional record.

The pathway towards formal inscription on the UN's list of Non-Self-Governing Territories; the step that would most directly activate the UK's decolonisation obligations and trigger international oversight of Scotland's self-determination process; requires engagement with both bodies, comprehensive documentation, and ultimately a General Assembly resolution. This is not usually a rapid process. But it is a process that has formally begun and Liberation Scotland has done well until now. Report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 's reception by the Secretary-General marks its entry into the formal institutional record that these bodies draw upon.

UN Special Rapporteurs, Treaty Bodies, and the Universal Periodic Review

The submission of document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 opens channels of engagement with UN Special Rapporteurs whose mandates are directly relevant to Scotland's situation. Most directly, the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order (whose keynote address at Liberation Scotland's Geneva conference in September 2025 affirmed Scotland's constitutional right of self-determination) represents an existing and engaged ally within the UN human rights system (Katrougalos, 2025).

The Universal Periodic Review mechanism, through which the UK Government's human rights record is examined by peer member states at the Human Rights Council, provides another avenue. The formal presence of report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 in the UN record gives member states a specific and authoritative document to which they can refer when raising Scotland's self-determination claim during UK UPR sessions. The institutional record builds with each intervention, each engagement, each submission. This is how East Timor's claim was built. This is how Western Sahara's claim is maintained. This is how Scotland's claim will be progressively established as an international institutional fact.

Three Paragraphs and Their Obsolescence

The Coloniser's Response and Its Inadequacy

The UK Government's response to the Scottish Parliament's committee inquiry into independence referendum mechanisms producing SP Paper 1030 was three paragraphs long. It did not mention the UN Charter. It did not acknowledge a right of self-determination and dismissed Scotland's constitutional future and independence as "not one of the issues that really matter to people in Scotland." It cited the colonial state's own Supreme Court as the final authority on Scotland's constitutional position.

Those three paragraphs reveal a colonial power that does not feel obliged to justify its authority to the institution it colonised, that does not consider international law relevant to its domestic constitutional management of a colonial relationship, and that has not registered that the terms of the engagement have fundamentally changed. They were the coloniser's position stated without disguise: there is no route outside Westminster, no right, no mechanism, and the matter is closed.

The entire apparatus of SP Paper 1030 (twelve academic witnesses drawn from the British colonial academic ecosystem, four advisers connected through the ESRC-funded Centre on Constitutional Change, 25 pages of comparative constitutional scholarship, 109 paragraphs of conclusions) was assembled to decorate those three paragraphs with scholarly legitimacy. And all of it arrived at precisely the same destination as the three paragraphs themselves: Scotland cannot be free without the colonial state's permission. (We’ll come back to that colonial report soon since it was clearly designed by the English colonial state to counter Liberation Scotland.)

Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 is what the change looks like. It is Scotland's self-determination claim in the international legal space where colonial claims are properly adjudicated, where the colonial state's constitutional self-description is not the final word, where domestic courts are not the final authority, where the principle that a state cannot be the judge of its own colonial relationship is rigorously applied.

The English colonial state cannot withdraw report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 from the UN record. It cannot prevent Liberation Scotland from addressing the Committee of 24. It cannot prevent member states from raising Scotland's self-determination claim at the Human Rights Council, the UPR, or the General Assembly. It cannot prevent UN Special Rapporteurs from engaging with Scotland's case or the progressive accumulation of an international institutional record that establishes Scotland's colonial status with the authority of the UN system itself.

What it can do is continue to manage the domestic discourse: to ensure that Scottish people and Scottish institutions continue to understand Scotland's constitutional question as a domestic constitutional matter rather than an international colonial claim. SP Paper 1030, with its terms of reference confining analysis to "the UK constitutional context", was precisely this management in parliamentary form; the epistemic, colonial cage maintained by the colonial academic establishment, preventing the international decolonisation framework from being examined from the inside.

That cage has now been named from the outside. By the United Nations system. In a document that is permanent, citable, and beyond the colonial state's power to withdraw.

The Moment and Its Meaning

There is a specific quality to the moment at which a colonial claim becomes formally international that every decolonisation movement in history has recognised. It is not the moment of independence. It is the moment at which the colonial relationship, which the administering power has insisted is voluntary, constitutional, domestically settled, undebatable, becomes a formal matter of international legal concern: documented in the record of the international system, subject to the oversight of international institutions, and generating obligations for the international community that do not depend on the colonial state's consent for their existence.

Fanon’s analysis can be understood as describing the moment at which the colonial relationship is recognised and named for what it is, rather than for what the colonial power insists it represents. Decolonisation is a recovery of the language through which the colonised interpret their own condition. Walter Mignolo’s concept of “delinking” (2000) likewise describes a rupture with the colonial epistemology that naturalises and reproduces structures of domination.

Scotland is experiencing that moment. Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 represents not independence, not the immediate listing of Scotland on the UN's Non-Self-Governing Territory register, not the overnight transformation of Scotland's constitutional situation. It represents the formal, institutional, historic, legally significant entry of Scotland's colonial claim into the United Nations system: submitted by a major Chinese ECOSOC-status organisation of considerable international standing, received by the Secretary-General, registered under UN procedures, grounded in the foundational instruments of the international decolonisation framework, and establishing with doctrinal precision that Scotland meets every legal criterion for recognition as a Non-Self-Governing Territory.

Report UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 says Scotland is a colony.

The UN Charter says colonised peoples have the right to self-determination.

Resolution 1514 says that right cannot be delayed by any pretext whatsoever.

Resolution 1541 says Scotland meets every condition for recognition as non-self-governing.

ARSIWA says the denial of that right is a continuing internationally wrongful act for which the English colonial state bears international legal responsibility.

The entire history of decolonisation; from India to Algeria to East Timor to the Chagos Islands and Namibia; says that colonial powers do not determine whether colonial relationships exist. The international community does. And the international community has now received the evidence.

The cage has been named. The international process has begun and the liberation is underway. The English colonial state, for all its parliamentary sovereignty and Supreme Court rulings and three-paragraph dismissals, cannot put the evidence back in the box from which Liberation Scotland and IPLSA have removed it.

Still Yours For Scotland publishes at decolonise.scot. Liberation Scotland is engaged in the active internationalisation of Scotland's colonial claim through the United Nations decolonisation framework. Document UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/61/NGO/210 was submitted by IPLSA in partnership with Liberation Scotland and other partners to the United Nations Human Rights Council, 61st session, and has been received by the Secretary-General and registered under UN procedures.

* SP Paper 1030 is the Scottish Parliament's February 2026 report on independence referendum mechanisms, produced by its Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee following an inquiry that assembled twelve academic witnesses and four advisers (all operating within UK constitutional, colonial assumptions) and concluded that Scotland has no route to a referendum without Westminster's consent. As I have documented on X (@thomsonchris), the report confined its entire inquiry to "the UK constitutional context," systematically excluded the international law of decolonisation, and arrived at conclusions that replicated the UK Government's own three-paragraph colonial submission dismissing Scotland's constitutional future as "not one of the issues that really matter to people in Scotland". The report is, in short, the Scottish Parliament's own institutional reproduction of the colonial state's constitutional position, dressed in parliamentary authority.

** These Islands is an English colonial think tank incorporated as a not-for-profit private company limited by guarantee in Scotland (Company Number SC557672), founded in 2017 and led principally by Kevin Hague, an English businessman enemy of Scotland, based in Scotland, as Chairman, alongside Professor Ali Ansari of the University of St Andrews and historian Tom Holland as initial members. Classically, these two academics defend the English colonial state. Its Chief Executive is Sam Taylor, a propagandist against Scotland and Scots, who manages the organisation's operations and the dissemination of its colonial output across Scottish public debate. Its contributing editors and regular contributors include John Ferry, John Lloyd, Jim Gallagher, and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, among others. Its Advisory Council includes Lord Peter Hennessy of Nympsfield, Fiona Hill CBE (former Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Theresa May), Philip Rycroft (former Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union), Baroness Joyce Quin (former Minister of State for Europe), Brian Wilson (former Labour MP and Government Minister), and academics from British colonial or colonised (for Scottish universities) universities including Professor Brendan Simms (Cambridge), Professor Margaret MacMillan (Oxford), and Professor Colin Kidd (St Andrews). The organisation presents itself as dedicated to understanding the relationship between the nations of the British Isles while its funding sources remain undisclosed. Its structural colonial function (taking colonial economic outcomes as natural baselines, treating Westminster sovereignty as the legitimate analytical framework, excluding the international law of decolonisation entirely, and supplying unionist politicians with intellectual tools to neutralise Scotland's self-determination claim) is consistent, sustained, and serves the constitutional position of the English colonial state over Scotland regardless of the individual intentions of its members.

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