A WOMAN who refused to register her daughter's birth because she
wanted her to be Scottish and not British will not be prosecuted.
Mr William Orr, procurator-fiscal at Inverness, confirmed yesterday
that proceedings against Miss Stella Anderson, 27, of Shillinghill,
Alness, have been dropped.
Miss Anderson is the common-law wife of constitutional campaigner
Brian Robertson, known as ''Robbie the Pict''.
She was due to face trial at Inverness Sheriff Court yesterday under
the 1965 Scottish Act controlling the Registration of Births, Deaths,
and Marriages for allegedly failing to inform her local office last
November of the birth of Rhiann, now aged one.
Although Miss Anderson was delighted she was not facing trial, she did
not hail it as a
victory for her common-law husband's battle against the legal system.
Past protests have often resulted in his being prosecuted for road
traffic offences such as failing to have a road fund licence or an MoT
certificate.
She said: ''Rhiann is the last remnant of a Scottish popular
sovereignty but, yet again, the Scottish courts have failed to answer
the question -- has the Treaty of Union been breached?
''I believe it has and, one day, the courts will have to answer this
charge.''
Miss Anderson is due to give birth in January but would not say
whether or not she would register the baby.
At an earlier hearing, Mr Alistair MacFadyen, her solicitor, lost a
legal argument that the charge was incompetent on constitutional
grounds. He contended that Parliament had acted unconstitutionally when
it introduced the British Nationality Act in 1981.
He claimed that provisions in the Treaty of Union in 1707 between
Scotland and England protected Scottish subjecthood, and have not
changed.
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