Title, Colonial Alienation, and the Unmasking of England’s Rule over Scotland. Sara Salyers at the United Nations in Geneva, 18 September 2025

When Sara Salyers spoke at the Palais des Nations at the United Nations in Geneva on 18 September 2025, she forced the international community to confront a truth it has evaded for generations. As a major force behind Liberation Scotland including SALVO, her intervention did not resemble a political speech. It resembled an indictment. With calm precision she placed Scotland within the intellectual, historical, and juridical categories that the United Nations itself created to dismantle colonial rule. The effect was unsettling, not because the arguments were radical, but because they were incontrovertible. By the end of her address, the hall was no longer a venue for diplomatic exchange. It had become a court in which the legitimacy of England’s authority over Scotland stood exposed.

Her starting point was the foundation of all decolonisation: title or territorial title. In the international legal system, title determines everything. Title decides who owns a territory, who speaks for it, who governs it and who has the right to its resources. Title cannot be invented, assumed, or retrospectively declared by an occupying power. It either exists in law or it does not. Salyers reminded the UN that Scotland’s title rests in the Crown of Scotland, a constitutional organism that long pre-dates the creation of the "British" state (England's colonial veil). In Scots constitutional law, the Crown is not the person of a monarch but the Community of the Realm, the people themselves. This is one of the oldest democratic doctrines in Europe. It survived the seventeenth century revolutions intact. A people who constitute the Crown are a people who hold title.

This principle is difficult for London to confront because its entire constitutional narrative depends on denying it. Salyers dismantled the official British account with a clarity that left no space for ambiguity. The Treaty of Union was supposed to create a single Crown, a single kingdom, and a single state. It failed to do so; or it probably did not want to. No single Crown of Great Britain was ever created. The English Crown simply absorbed Scotland into itself; or more exactly extented itself over Scotland; continued without interruption, and declared that a union had taken place. In constitutional reality nothing merged. England expanded. Scotland did not join a partner. Scotland was placed under the sovereignty of a colonising power or an administering power in international law and UN jargon.

This analysis goes to the heart of international law because the legal personality of a state is not defined by rhetoric but by continuity. England’s constitutional personality continued from 1707 (or from 1066) to the present without a break. What changed was not England’s identity, but the vocabulary used to conceal its expansion. The so-called United Kingdom is, as Salyers made clear, nothing more than England operating under a new name while governing a neighbouring nation without title; as well as Ireland, a country recognised globally and legally as a former English colony. The historical techniques of colonialism have simply been domesticated within Europe.

From this ontological point, she moved to a second principle: alienation of territory and resources. International law defines alienation as the administration, extraction, or disposal of a territory’s assets by a state that does not hold sovereign title. The administration of Scottish resources by the continuing English state fits this definition precisely. Scotland’s oil and gas revenues flow to the coloniser’s treasury. Scotland’s maritime boundaries were redrawn without consent. Scottish renewable energy is integrated into the coloniser’s domestic infrastructure. The Crown Estate in Scotland operates under English constitutional doctrines, not under the Scottish Crown. Even the Scottish Parliament exists only by statute of the coloniser and can be suspended or abolished unilaterally. It is a colonial parliament like the Volksraad in colonised Indonesia under the Dutch, the Legislative Council of India under English colonialism or the colonial or advisory councils existing in French, Portuguese, Belgian or German colonies like Senegal, Indochina, Angola, Congo and Namibia.

This is not devolution. It is colonial administration by another name. Devolution does not transfer title. It merely delegates the management of a territory while preserving the absolute supremacy of the colonising legislature. If a colonial authority permits limited self-administration, the underlying title (the legal situation of the territory) does not change. Title does not pass. It remains with the people. Administration without title remains alienation. Alienation without consent remains illegal occupation.

In conditions of colonial alienation, the administering power does not hold sovereign title. It exercises control without lawful sovereignty. Administration in such a context is not ownership. It is the management of a territory whose title has been withheld from its people. Alienation without the free and genuine consent of the people is unlawful. Governance without title is not sovereignty but occupation.

Every major decolonisation determination, from the Namibia Advisory Opinion (1971) to the Chagos Advisory Opinion (2019), confirms the same principle: the administering power cannot acquire title through control, delegation, or the passage of time. Where self-determination has not been fulfilled, sovereignty remains vested in the people, and the continued exercise of authority by the external power stands in violation of international law. England's presence in Scotland is illegal in international law and it must be declared so by the United Nations.

Salyers then exposed the most significant admission ever made by the British state, an admission that has remained hidden in plain sight: the 1954 Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs. That Commission declared that Scotland was a nation that entered the union as a voluntary partner and not as a dependency. Politicians repeat this phrase endlessly as if it were evidence of equality. Salyers revealed the clause for what it is: a trap set by the British state for itself since it is a privative definition. If Scotland is not a voluntary partner, Scotland is a dependency. The Scottish liberation movement has now demonstrated that the conditions for partnership never existed. There is no mutual consent or right of withdrawal. There are no equality of sovereignty and no independent capacity. England classifies Scotland as a dependency under its own terms. Once this classification is acknowledged, the UN decolonisation framework applies automatically. (Let's be clear: the UK state should have reported Scotland as a colony under Chapter 73 of the UN Charter in 1946).

Her analysis then turned to Scotland’s own constitutional tradition, which London has spent centuries erasing. The Claim of Right Act 1689 affirms the sovereignty of the Scottish people and prohibits the use of law as a tool of persecution. It codifies limitations on power that are incompatible with English parliamentary sovereignty. Under a genuine union, this Act would remain a living constitutional safeguard. Instead, it has been reduced to ceremonial debris. Peaceful advocacy can be classed as extremism. Counterterrorism powers are expanded for political effect. Political dissent is criminalised in ways incompatible with the law’s stated purpose. The devolved Scottish Parliament cannot protect the people because it is the creation of the coloniser’s Parliament. Scotland’s supposed constitutional protections survive only in form while being destroyed in substance. This pattern is characteristic of colonial governance, not of partnership.

From theory, Salyers returned to the material evidence of colonial domination. Scotland’s territory has been used as a strategic resource by the coloniser: military installations placed without Scottish consent, nuclear facilities imposed despite opposition, fishing rights allocated by the coloniser to external actors, natural wealth extracted and exported, and regulatory systems imposed to ensure that Scotland remains economically dependent. The coloniser’s infrastructure and defence posture rely on Scotland’s land and waters, and so does its seat at the UN Security Council, but the coloniser denies Scotland’s title to that land and those waters. This is the textbook definition of colonial and territorial alienation.

Salyers then drew the audience into the doctrinal core of the issue: erga omnes obligations. The International Court of Justice (founded and fully financed by a Scot going by the name of Andrew Carnegie, born in Dunfermline) has affirmed repeatedly that the right of peoples to self-determination is owed to the entire international community. This means that all states have a legal duty to refuse recognition of a colonising state’s authority over a people who retain territorial title. If an administering power violates this right, other states are obligated not to assist, not to recognise, and not to profit. This is why the Namibia judgment forbade recognition of South African authority in the territory and the East Timor case insisted that rights of self-determination are not bilateral. They are universal.

Applying this jurisprudence, Salyers stated that states have a duty not to recognise the continuing English state’s claim over Scotland’s territory or resources. They must not recognise oil concessions authorised by London; freeports imposed by London; and contracts based on the coloniser’s claimed sovereignty. They must not treat Scottish territory as British territory in defence arrangements. The legal implications are profound. Every international actor who cooperates with England in the administration of Scotland risks complicity in a breach of international law.

Salyers then dismantled the argument that Scotland can resolve its situation internally. A colonised territory cannot use the institutions of the coloniser to challenge colonisation. A devolved administration is not a sovereign body. It is an administrative branch of the continuing English state. It cannot assert title because it does not possess title or challenge the coloniser’s supremacy because it was created under that supremacy. Therefore, there is no internal remedy.

Scotland’s condition falls within the material scope of Article 73 of the UN Charter. The current absence of formal inscription on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories does not extinguish the obligations arising under Article 73 of the UN Charter where colonial alienation persists. It instead exposes a failure of recognition that must be corrected. The objective is clear: to secure inscription, trigger the United Nations decolonisation regime, and place the administering power under its full legal obligations. Article 2(7) of the UN Charter closes the escape route. An administering power cannot invoke its own constitutional order to obstruct the right of a people to self-determination. What is framed as “devolution” cannot displace an international legal question.

Her final movement exposed the historical continuity of English treaty practice. She cited the Treaty of Windsor with Ireland, colonial charters across Asia and Africa, and the repeated pattern in which England uses treaties to secure access before discarding them once domination is achieved. Treaties function as instruments of temporary legitimacy rather than lasting contracts. The Treaty of Union follows this colonial pattern precisely. The clauses that would have preserved equality were abandoned. The clauses that enabled English supremacy were entrenched. The only elements that survived were those that benefited the coloniser. Treaties used in this way do not constitute partnership. They constitute the legal mechanisms of colonial conquest.

Salyers’s warning to the international community was stark. If the world continues to tolerate the colonial domination of Scotland by England, then the principle of self-determination is no longer universal and becomes selective. It becomes political and an instrument of power rather than a right of peoples. The UN would then betray its founding covenant. If a European coloniser can disguise its domination behind constitutional rhetoric, then any state can do the same. The Charter collapses and the global post war legal order fractures. The moral architecture constructed after 1945 dissolves completely.

Her proposed remedy is therefore not only legal but restorative. Scotland must be recognised as a Non-Self-Governing Territory (a colony basically) because it meets every criterion of dependency. The Scottish people must be restored to their territorial title. Third states must honour their obligations through non recognition of English claims and through support for Scotland’s restitution. Decolonisation is not merely separation from the coloniser. Decolonisation is the repair of harm, the return of alienated property, the restoration of language and identity, and the dissolution of the structures of control that have suppressed a people for centuries.

Salyers did more than articulate Scotland’s claim. She transformed Scotland’s situation into a test of the international order. Her reasoning was structured, forensic, and grounded in doctrines that the UN itself cannot disown. In dismantling the myth of the United Kingdom as a voluntary union, she reconstructed Scotland as a case that mirrors earlier struggles against colonial domination. If the UN fails to uphold Scotland’s rights, it sends a message to the world that the era of decolonisation is over. If it succeeds, it reaffirms that the Charter still possesses meaning.

Salyers’s intervention stands as a moment of truth; revealing England as a colonising power, not as a constitutional partner. It reasserts Scotland not as a region but as a people whose title has never been extinguished and presents the international community with a choice: uphold the law or surrender to the politics of power. The future of the decolonisation project will be shaped by how the world responds to the case she has now placed before it.

Listen to Sara Salyers' speech at the United Nations Geneva Office (UNOG):