We Audited Scotland's Senior Court. Here Is What Its Own Record Shows.

Sovereignty Series Part 15

A companion article to "The Scottish Judiciary in Constitutional Polarity", published 13 June 2026

Last month @ScrdiScot published a paper called The Scottish Judiciary in Constitutional Polarity. What the paper maps is the capture of the Scottish justice system, and the complicity of the office holders who operate within it.

The method is an audit of Scotland’s senior civil court, the Court of Session. Not an opinion piece, not a manifesto, an audit: it analyses the court’s own record, statute by statute and decision by decision, checks every claim against the primary source, and writes down what the record composes. It sits on permanent public deposit at the Internet Archive, where anyone can check it, because that is what it was written to be: an archived record documenting the colonial subjugation of a nation’s legal system.

The audit centres on one foundational question:

By what right does Scotland’s highest civil court enforce a doctrine its own bench has named alien to Scots law?

Before that question can be answered truthfully, one glaringly obvious fact is pivotal: There is no such thing as ‘British’ law. Count the layers instead. Four nations and three legal jurisdictions: England and Wales together, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. Two legal systems and jurisdictions retained in the Articles of the Treaty of Union, 1707: Scotland’s and England’s. Two separate legal foundations. Wales had its own native law; England abolished it by statute in 1535, in the statute’s own words undertaking “utterly to extirp all and singular the sinister Usages and Customs” of the Welsh. That is why Wales entered the Union silently, inside England, and shares a single jurisdiction with it to this day. England then repealed the annexation statutes themselves, in 1993 and 1994, replacing them with nothing: the official record lists no outstanding effects, and Wales’s incorporation rests today on no living statute at all. Ireland had its own native law; English common law was imposed over it, and Ireland was joined to the state by a different union a century later. Most of the island of Ireland liberated itself: it is a republic today, making its own laws under a constitution its people gave to themselves. What remains of annexed Ireland is ‘Northern Ireland’, subjugated by an imposed English legal system under its colonial name. Scotland is presented as the exception: a separate legal system on its own foundation. England could not abolish Scots law in 1707, so its continuation became a guarantee of the ‘Union of Parliaments’. However, the number of legal jurisdictions refuses to line up with reality. The records of Empire show what was abolished, what was absorbed, and what could be neither.

When the British establishment, media, institutions and commentators, national and international alike, use the term ‘British law’, they are using ‘British’ as a colonial mask for English domination, whether intentionally or not. Yet the mask hides almost nothing, because the system is not shy about what it is. A former Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, named it an “elective dictatorship” on the BBC in 1976: a Parliament whose only limits are “political and moral”, not legal. Between 2015 and 2021 the House of Commons ran a formal procedure called English Votes for English Laws, certifying legislation by nation and giving English MPs a veto stage over English laws, while no equivalent Scottish gate has ever shielded Scots law from Westminster’s reach. English laws got an English gate. Scots law got no gate at all. The word British is not there to hide the doctrine; it is there to hide the doctrine’s nationality from the people it is applied to.

The doctrine is not shared: Scotland’s own senior court said so, in its own courtroom, on its own record. In 1953, in MacCormick v Lord Advocate, the Lord President of the Court of Session, Lord Cooper, held:

“The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law.”

No counterpart: not a softer version, not a Scottish variant, simply absent. That is the bench naming the doctrine alien: not a campaigner, not a critic, the Lord President of the Court of Session, on the record. The ruling has never been overturned.

What the audit found

So the paper went looking for how the court operates against its own record. Here is what it found;

Since 2015, a Scot who wants to appeal a Court of Session decision to the UK Supreme Court needs permission: from the Inner House first, and failing that, from the Supreme Court itself. The route of appeal is literally a permission gate.

Every judge of the Court of Session is commissioned through the Scotland Act 1998, a Westminster statute. Every Bill of the Scottish Parliament passes through a Crown consent gate before it can become law, and that gate is welded in: the Scotland Act itself orders Holyrood’s standing rules to contain it, so the Scottish Parliament could not remove the gate by its own vote if every member wanted it gone.

Then there is the Claim of Right of 1689, the instrument by which the Scottish people’s representatives removed a king for breaking the terms of his office, the foundation of Scottish popular sovereignty? In more than three hundred years, Westminster has never repealed it and never engaged it. No substantive Act touches it; the only marks on it in three centuries are administrative housekeeping. Sit with what that pairing means. A parliament claiming unlimited power over Scotland has left the one instrument that denies the claim standing on the books, untouched, for three hundred years. You do not leave a live foundation standing unless you cannot remove it.

Not abolished. Not absorbed. Encased. That is the paper’s word for the mechanism: what could not be killed was caged alive (encased).

The paper gives the whole arrangement a precise technical name, and earns it mechanically, step by step, from the record: the Sovereign-External Colonial Enforcement Court, SE-CEC for short. In plain words, a court enforcing, over the people whose instruments it exists to serve, rules from a sovereignty external to its own foundation. The finding underneath the terminology fits in one sentence: Scotland has a sovereign court, older than the Union and preserved by the Union’s own terms “in all time coming”, that has chosen for three centuries to run on another tradition’s rules, against its own recorded law.

Beneath the paper sits the research that produced it, which has not been issued yet. The audit work behind the classification has so far identified, Act by Act against the primary record, seventy-nine Acts of Westminster reaching into Scots law between 1707 and today: the statutory casing itself, catalogued, dated and classified. Seventy-nine Acts reaching in, and not one engaging the foundation. The full schedule is being prepared for publication as a dedicated follow-up, with every entry checkable against the primary record.

The doctrine in full view

The doctrine is not abstract: it lands on people. Here are three, on the record.

Mark Hirst, a highly experienced investigative journalist, was prosecuted over a video he posted supporting Alex Salmond. The sheriff threw the case out: no case to answer. Hirst then sued for malicious prosecution. In February 2026 the Court of Session found, on the papers, a lack of objective reasonable and probable cause for the prosecution, and then dismissed his claim anyway, because a statute gives prosecutors immunity. The judge did the one thing left in his power: he declared that immunity incompatible with the human right to have your case heard. In June, Scotland’s senior civil bench took even that away. Three judges recalled the declaration, ruling that because the immunity is ‘substantive’ law, the right to a remedy never came into existence at all, so nothing was breached, and the Lord Advocate cannot give the immunity up even by her own choice. The first court told him the door was locked. The second court told him there is no door.

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s former First Minister, was falsely accused of sexual misconduct and was acquitted of every criminal charge brought against him, winning a judicial review in which the Court of Session found the government process against him “tainted with apparent bias”, awarding £512,000 in expenses, the Scots term for legal costs. Not a penny of it reached him or his wife; it went on the legal bills of winning. He died in October 2024; the formal notice of sequestration recorded his estate at £344,347 of debt against £2,282 of assets, primarily the cost of his legal defences, and his widow has faced exposure to losing the family home through the ordinary mechanics of sequestration applied to the debts his vindication generated. The vindication arrived. The cost of obtaining it defeated everything it vindicated.

Craig Murray, former diplomat and human rights activist, has pursued a judicial review of the Palestine Action proscription. The case has been paused three times in the Court of Session on the motion of the UK Government, most recently on 28 May, while English proceedings set the timetable from London. The English Court of Appeal upheld the proscription on 15 June, then a week later refused permission to appeal onward to the UK Supreme Court, with the Home Secretary opposing. The English process the pause was waiting on has, so far as the Court of Appeal is concerned, run its course, and Murray has still not had a hearing on the merits of the Scottish cause. On 1 July his team lodged a motion, backed by a Note from Aidan O’Neill KC, asking the court to recall the pause and send the cause up to its own Inner House. Within two days, the UK Government gave notice it will oppose. Read that plainly: a Scot, in Scotland’s own senior court, formally asking that court to take its own cause back from an English court, and London objecting in advance to a Scot exercising his right for it to be handed back and heard under Scots law.

Cost. Immunity. Delay. Three citizens, each right on the substance the law was supposed to protect, each watching the machinery of Westminster defeat the remedy Scots law was supposed to deliver. The audit’s finding is that this is not three malfunctions. It is one structural design, manifesting three times.

The Dean’s confession

You do not have to take the paper’s word for the doctrine, because the most senior advocate in Scotland has stated it in public, in his own name.

In December 2023 an MP wrote on X that in Scotland the people are sovereign, not parliament. Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, the elected head of the Scots bar, replied via his X account:

“in Scotland, as in every parliamentary democracy, the people exercise their sovereignty at the ballot box. Thereafter, the elected parliament is sovereign. Like it or not, that’s how it works.”

He returned to the same thread again that evening:

“And, given some of the comments, worth remembering that whilst Scotland remains part of the UK the sovereign parliament in question is Westminster. Holyrood has very wide powers, but not sovereignty per se. Again, like it or not, that’s how it is.”

At 5:26 the next morning, he carried the doctrine to its limit:

“Let’s envisage they pass a law which 100% of the populace oppose. That law is still law and, unless struck down by the courts in the very limited circumstances where that is possible, will be until repealed - by Parliament, not by the people. Sorry, but that’s the actuality.”

Now read those quotes again. Every single Scot could oppose a law, and it would still bind them all. Only the parliament, never the people, could change it. The sovereignty of the Scottish people makes that sentence its exact negation, having been spoken by the senior Faculty officer of the very court whose own Lord President ruled that the doctrine behind it has no counterpart in Scots constitutional law. Nobody in London instructed him, and nobody needed to. That is both a foundational and a continual operational finding: for three hundred and nineteen years, the guard on this legal cantonment has not been an English garrison; it has been Scotland’s own judiciary. The very office holders of the Scots legal system, enabling and abetting Westminster’s colonial hegemony over Scots sovereign rights. The Dean’s words are not one man’s opinion; they are the guard’s standing orders, spoken aloud. Yet the court holds no record of any transfer of sovereign title, whilst the guards’ own record shows the committal was never lawful. The cage was never locked. Prisoners held without warrant require no permission to break free from their invisible chains, only self-determination.

The unyielding foundation

This is why this paper matters beyond diagnosis. Everything the 1707 annexation could not abolish, it had to leave standing, meaning what Scots built is all still there.

The Court of Session stands, preserved “in all time coming” by the Union’s own terms. The Great Seal of Scotland has been in unbroken use for nine centuries and has never left the country. The Claim of Right of 1689 has not been repealed, and the House of Commons itself reaffirmed it in 2018 without a division. On the record of the Scots Parliament, from 1592 and again in 1663, stands an Act reserving to every member of the community of the realm, every Scot, the standing right to challenge acts that prejudice their rights. No permission required, no office needed.

Westminster’s authority in Scotland runs through those Scots instruments. It needs them alive. That is the paradox the audit documents from end to end: the system preserved the evidence of what it could not lawfully take, and the instruments it encased remain in operation, waiting on nothing but exercise.

The full audit is deposited at the Internet Archive here [SE-CEC Paper] and published on the Foundation Scotland Substack here: [SE-CEC Substack].

The sovereign rights of ‘Scots’ have never been lost. The question is whether we as a people choose to stand together to reactivate the exercise of our rights? This is the ultimate test of our sovereignty.

All Of Us First 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

#SovereignScots #ScotlandAColony #LetTheRecordsSpeak #SovereigntySeries

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Sources

Scots statutory and constitutional primary records

• Claim of Right of 1689. Records of the Parliaments of Scotland (RPS) 1689/3/108; manuscript record, National Records of Scotland PA2/33. Has not been repealed. Reaffirmed by House of Commons motion, 4 July 2018, passed without division. rps.ac.uk

• Act salvo jure cujuslibet 1592. RPS 1592/4/60. rps.ac.uk/trans/1592/4/60

• Act salvo jure cujuslibet 1663. RPS 1663/6/146. rps.ac.uk/trans/1663/6/146

• Act Ratifying and Approving the Treaty of Union of the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, Parliament of Scotland, 16 January 1707, Articles XVIII and XIX. RPS 1706/10/257; legislation.gov.uk/aosp/1707/7

• The Great Seal of Scotland: nine centuries of continuous use within Scotland; treated at length in A Tale of Two Masters, Foundation Scotland. [A Tale of Two Masters]

English statutory records

• Laws in Wales Act 1535 (27 Hen. 8 c. 26), An Act for Laws and Justice to be ministered in Wales in like Form as it is in this Realm, Parliament of England, passed with no Welsh representation; preamble quoted verbatim in the text. Repealed with effect from 21 December 1993 by the Welsh Language Act 1993 (c. 38), Schedule 2; the official record lists no outstanding effects. legislation.gov.uk/aep/Hen8/27/26

• Laws in Wales Act 1542 (34 & 35 Hen. 8 c. 26). Repealed; the final surviving section repealed by the Sale of Goods (Amendment) Act 1994. legislation.gov.uk/aep/Hen8/34-35/26

• Union with Ireland Act 1800 (39 & 40 Geo. 3 c. 67), with the parallel Act of Union (Ireland) 1800: the separate union joining Ireland to Great Britain, effective 1 January 1801.

Irish constitutional records

• Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Constitution of Ireland, 1937, enacted by the people by plebiscite; enacting formula quoted in the text. irishstatutebook.ie

United Kingdom statutory and procedural records

• Scotland Act 1998, Section 95 (commissions of Court of Session judges) and Schedule 3, paragraph 7 (Crown consent required in the Parliament’s standing orders). legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/46

• Standing Orders of the Scottish Parliament, Rule 9.11 (Crown consent), 7th Edition, 11 May 2026. parliament.scot

• Court of Session Act 1988, Section 40, as substituted by the Courts Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 (asp 18), Section 117: appeal to the UK Supreme Court in civil matters lies only with the permission of the Inner House or, failing that, of the Supreme Court itself. In force from 22 September 2015.

• Standing Orders of the House of Commons, English Votes for English Laws procedure: adopted 22 October 2015, rescinded 13 July 2021; certification of Bills by nation, with an English consent stage.

• Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, Section 170 (immunity in summary proceedings), as read in the Hirst decisions below.

• Human Rights Act 1998, Section 4 (declaration of incompatibility); Article 6, European Convention on Human Rights (the right of access to a court).

Case law and causes, primary records

• MacCormick v Lord Advocate 1953 SC 396, per Lord Cooper of Culross, Lord President, at 411; quoted verbatim in the text. Read at bailii.org.

• Hirst v Chief Constable of the Police Service of Scotland and the Lord Advocate [2026] CSOH 8, Lord Lake, Outer House, February 2026: lack of objective reasonable and probable cause found on the papers; action dismissed under Section 170; declarator of incompatibility with Article 6 pronounced. Opinion published 5 February 2026: scotcourts.gov.uk/media/ppmhltjh/2026csoh8-mark-hirst-against-the-chief-constable-police-service-of-scotland-and-others.pdf

• Hirst, reclaiming motion, Second Division of the Inner House, 2026: Lord Justice Clerk Beckett, Lord Malcolm and Lord Armstrong; heard 8 April 2026; declarator recalled, Article 6 held not engaged, Section 170 held incapable of waiver, and the claim dismissed as incompetent. Reported with direct quotation of the opinion: Scottish Legal News, June 2026, scottishlegal.com/articles/inner-house-recalls-lord-ordinarys-declaration-that-summary-immunity-provision-is-incompatible-with-article-6-echr. Neutral citation to be added when the judgment publishes on scotcourts.

• Petition of Alexander Salmond for Judicial Review, Court of Session, decided 8 January 2019, per Lord Pentland: procedure conceded unlawful, procedurally unfair and “tainted with apparent bias”; final settlement of £512,250 in expenses confirmed by the Scottish Government. Reported: itv.com/news/2019-08-13/alex-salmond-receives-500-000-legal-costs-payout-from-scottish-government

• Craig Murray, Petition for Judicial Review, Court of Session, reference COS-P1017-25: sisted on the motion of the UK Government, most recently 28 May 2026; motion to recall the sist and report the cause to the Inner House lodged 1 July 2026, supported by a Note by Aidan O’Neill KC; UK Government notice of opposition, 3 July 2026. Motion and Note published in full: craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/07/palestine-action-proscription-we-fight-back/

• Ammori v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] EWCA Civ 721, Court of Appeal, 15 June 2026, upholding the proscription; judgment: judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Final-open-judgment-Ammori-v-SSHD.pdf. Permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court refused 22 June 2026, the Home Secretary opposing, as recorded in the Note by Aidan O’Neill KC published in the Murray petition record above.

Contemporary records

• Roddy Dunlop KC, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates: statements published on X, 7 and 8 December 2023, quoted verbatim in the text; every quotation anchored across two screenshot captures of the thread. Active screenshot capture held; archived at archive.ph/SeTuh; reported in the Scottish Daily Express.

• Estate of Alexander Salmond: formal notice of sequestration, Register of Insolvencies (Accountant in Bankruptcy): debts of £344,347.58 against assets of £2,282.38; trustee in sequestration appointed on the application of Mrs Salmond; “not a penny” of the £512,250 reaching Salmond confirmed by Levy & Macrae for the estate. Reported: scotsman.com, 7 November 2025.

• Lord Hailsham, Elective Dictatorship, the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, BBC, October 1976; published in The Listener, 21 October 1976; “political and moral” quoted in the text.

• Westminster-over-Scotland statutory schedule, 1707 to the present: seventy-nine Acts so far identified, Act by Act, on the audited record; the full schedule is in preparation for publication.