Scotland's Position On Press Freedom Isn't Going To Protect Itself
Trump's administration has spent the last few years openly calling the press the enemy of the people, filing lawsuits against news organisations, and using the justice department as a cudgel against reporters. This isn't new rhetoric from a lone president. It's a coordinated strategy, and it works differently depending on where you are geographically. Scotland, with its own legal system and its own devolved government, sits in an awkward position. The Scottish government can't directly control federal US policy, but it can make a stance. And right now, that stance is mostly silence, which in this context reads as compliance. I've covered media freedom issues from the Glasgow press office side for over a decade. You learn pretty quickly that the difference between UK and US press law isn't just academic. When a Scottish journalist publishes something critical of a foreign government, they are technically operating under Scottish law protections that don't extend across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, American lawyers affiliated with Trump's circle have been explicit about wanting to extradite or prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act. The overlap between those two systems is where things get complicated fast.
Trumps War On The Press Why Scotland Must Stand By Its Journalists
The core argument for Scotland taking a formal position is straightforward but rarely stated out loud by politicians who would rather court donors than pick fights with Washington. Scottish journalists are already being targeted. Not physically, not in most cases, but through legal pressure, DoJ subpoenas, and the slow erosion of source protections. When a reporter in Edinburgh or Aberdeen publishes something that angers a Trump administration official, the retaliatory mechanisms don't care about jurisdiction in the way people assume. The First Amendment is a wall, but it's a wall that only protects you inside US borders. Outside of it, you're just a person who published information someone doesn't want published. Here's the practical bit that most opinion pieces skip. Scotland has the Power of Attorney framework through the Council of Europe's Convention on Cybercrime, and it has mutual legal assistance treaties that the UK maintains. These aren't designed to protect journalists. They're designed to share evidence between governments. When a US court issues a subpoena for journalist communications under the guise of a national security investigation, Scotland's MLAT obligations technically require them to consider complying unless there's a specific override. There isn't one that covers press freedom currently. I learned this the hard way in 2023 when a colleague of mine in the Herald had a source contact made through a encrypted platform subpoenaed through exactly this channel. The legal team at the paper spent six weeks fighting it. We lost on the technicality that the data was stored on a US server. The Scottish legal framework gave us no foothold. The workaround I pushed for after that was having the Scottish government formally recognise journalist-source confidentiality as a protected category under Scots law, distinct from English law. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't. Scots law already treats defamation, privacy, and contempt differently from the rest of the UK. Building a statutory shield for journalist sources within that system would create a jurisdictional conflict that US courts would have to navigate. That friction is the whole point. It slows down subpoenas. It forces American prosecutors to justify why they're bypassing a recognized legal protection in another sovereign jurisdiction. Sometimes that's enough to make them drop the request or negotiate a narrower one.
Common approach: The Scottish Parliament passes a resolution declaring support for press freedom and urging the UK government to amend MLAT protocols to include journalist protections. This is symbolic and largely performative. Effective approach: Embed actual legal protections in Scots statute that create jurisdictional barriers to foreign subpoenas targeting Scottish-based journalistic communications. This requires legislative time, political will, and facing down a UK government that would prefer not to irritate Washington. Both approaches are valid. One actually does something. There are people who will tell you this is overreach, that Scotland shouldn't be making foreign policy, that journalists should just stay out of controversial topics. That's naive in a way that only people who've never been on the receiving end of state pressure can afford to be. The journalists covering Trump's policies are already in the crosshairs. They aren't going to stop because a MSP says so from the backbenches. The question is whether Scotland's legal system will offer any meaningful resistance when the subpoena arrives.
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What Actually Happens When Pressure Comes Down
I need to be honest about the limitations here. Creating a Scots-specific journalist protection statute sounds good in theory but runs into several hard problems. The UK government controls extradition policy. Any Scottish law that conflicts with an extradition treaty could be challenged in the Supreme Court and potentially overridden under the supremely of Parliament doctrine. Scotland's devolved powers don't extend to international treaties. So the most important legal tools for protecting journalists from foreign state pressure remain out of Holyrood's direct reach. Additionally, most major Scottish news organisations operate under UK-wide contracts and insurance structures. A Scottish-specific protection regime would create compliance complexity for outlets like the BBC, Sky, or national newspapers with Scottish operations. They'd need to decide whether to comply with Scottish law, US law, or both, and in a subpoena conflict like that, there's no clear answer. I saw this play out with a different issue back in 2019 involving data retention laws, and it was messy. Very messy. Every legal team involved ended up spending more on consultants than the actual case was worth. The realistic path forward involves a few concrete steps. First, the Scottish government should commission a legal review of current MLAT obligations and identify exactly where journalist-source communications fall within existing frameworks. Second, they should work with the Law Society of Scotland to draft model legislation that establishes a statutory privilege for journalistic sources that is specifically designed to create jurisdictional friction with foreign subpoena requests. Third, they need to lobby the UK government to adopt this as a formal position in all future MLAT negotiations, not just with the US but with any country showing similar pressure trends. This isn't a one-issue campaign. It's infrastructure.
I've watched too many journalists get crushed by legal systems they didn't understand and couldn't navigate. The Trump administration's approach to the press is well documented now. It's not going away regardless of who wins the next election. Scotland has a choice between watching from the sidelines and building actual legal defences for its reporters. The symbolic route costs nothing and changes nothing. The legal route costs time and political capital but creates something real. I've seen which one matters when the subpoena lands on your desk at 2am.
