EDINBURGH, April 22 (RIA Novosti), Mark Hirst – The Scottish Government will seek to reinstate a maritime boundary to its pre-1999 limits if Scots back independence in a referendum to be held on 18th September, a spokeswoman has confirmed to RIA Novosti Tuesday.
In 1999, just before the UK Government devolved a range of domestic powers to Scotland, British Ministers introduced legislation that redrew the previous maritime boundary between Scotland and England.
The new boundary extended 200 miles in a north-west direction and placed 6000 square miles of previously Scottish waters under English legal control.
The move was widely criticised at the time and seen as an attempt by the British Government to secure rights to oil and gas fields in the North Sea should Scotland eventually become independent.
Now the Scottish Government has restated its intention to reclaim the disputed waters in the event of Scottish independence.
In an exclusive statement to RIA Novosti a Scottish Government spokeswoman said, “The setting of maritime boundaries for an independent Scotland will be guided by international law.
“The vast bulk of oil and gas in the UK comes from the Scottish Continental Shelf and will be in Scotland after independence,” the spokeswoman said.
“Analysis by academics at Aberdeen University tells us that in excess of 90 per cent of the oil and gas revenues are from fields in Scottish waters, based on well-established principles of international law.”
The spokeswoman told RIA Novosti that determining all of Scotland’s marine boundaries would be the subject of negotiations following a successful yes vote in the independence referendum and added, “Scottish Ministers are confident that these negotiations will be conducted in accordance with the principles that underpin the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, to which the UK is a signatory, and that a positive outcome, guided by that international legal framework, will be achieved.”
A senior legal adviser to the UK Government, Professor James Crawford of Cambridge University, earlier told an audience at Edinburgh University that the British Government’s position was “untenable”.
Another internationally respected lawyer, Alan Perry, branded the redrawing of the boundary by the UK Government as a “dreadful blunder”, adding that the British Government’s claim that it was following international law was “disingenuous in the extreme.”
Scots will go to the polls on 18th September in a referendum that will ask a simply Yes/No question “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?”
