Stephen Allen. The Chagos Islanders and International Law

Abstract

The tale of the Chagos Archipelago (British Indian Ocean Territory, BIOT) raises a wide spectrum of transnational legal questions, all across the fields of human rights, environment and disarmament. Last-born of the Empire's colonies, the BIOT was established - and systematically depopulated - for the sole purpose of accommodating a strategic US military base during the Cold War years in 1965-1966.1 The territory has since generated extensive litigation in the national courts of the United Kingdom (UK) and the USA as well as proceedings in the European Court of Human Rights and an arbitration under Annex VII of the Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Stephen Allen, senior lecturer at the University of London's Queen Mary College, has long followed and commented on legal developments in the Chagos cases as an observer. The focus of his attention remains the plight of the native Chagossians, a small Kreol-speaking people of African and Malgasy origin, whose exile (mainly to Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK) has lasted for more than 40 years. The first two chapters of the book summarize and analyse the unsuccessful attempts by the Chagos islanders to seek judicial redress for their expulsion. Their case ultimately turned on the continuing force of 19th-century imperial law (the Colonial Laws Validity Act) under which the BIOT was created, versus the islanders' right of abode, which was effectively abolished in 1971, restored in 2000 and re-abolished in 2004 by simple executive orders-in-council under royal prerogative powers. In 2008, a narrow three-to-two majority of the House of Lords' Appellate Committee upheld the legitimacy of this Victorian remnant of colonial law-making (characterized as an anachronistic survival in the scathing dissent by Lord Justice Bingham).