A longer story with hyperlinks is available here
By Daniel Simpson
Blink and you missed it, but Britain’s highest court says it’s legal to steal someone’s homeland.
That’s old news now, of course (though scarcely reported in America, where it counts), but no less scandalous for that.
More than 40 years ago, the U.S. and UK conspired to evict the Chagos islanders, and turned their Indian Ocean paradise into an air base. Since then, three separate courts, and seven senior judges, have upheld the right of these British subjects to return.
Last week that right was quashed by the House of Lords, which said the government was not just entitled to banish them forever, but right to use a royal decree to do so.
This arcane power, known as an Order in Council, was wheeled out in 2004 to stop an earlier High Court victory leading to resettlement. Why? Because the Americans said that would “significantly degrade the strategic importance of a vital military asset.”
The asset in question, one of 761 Pentagon properties worldwide, is Diego Garcia, a base used to ferry prisoners for torture, or mere “detention or interrogation”, to quote a retired American offical.
But the Chagossians aren’t trying to return there; just to islands 150 miles away. What they’d do if they went back is open to question. Colonial-era coconut plantations died when the islanders were shipped to slums in Mauritius.
The British government says resettlement is unfeasible, though it’s never seriously investigated the option, let alone how it might be funded. A study by a former official says ecotourism, fishing and farming would provide jobs and income. Private investors could build an airstrip, while related costs of up to 17.5 million pounds could be met from development budgets, including billions in unclaimed European aid.
Not so, said the men in ermine. Lord Hoffman’s judgement declared that since the Chagossians had “shown no inclination to return to live Crusoe-like in poor and barren conditions”, they couldn’t expect UK government assistance.
The European funding, meanwhile, is off limits. You need a permanently settled population to apply for it. But, Lord Hoffman concluded, “there seems to me no basis for saying that the right of abode is in its nature so fundamental that the legislative powers of the Crown simply cannot touch it.”
In other words, Britain demands the right to abuse its own subjects’ human rights. Outrageous, say campaigners: “How can it lecture Zimbabwe or Sudan on land dispossessions?” asks Ishbel Matheson of the Minority Rights Group.
MPs are convening a campaigning group of their own, via an Early Day Motion which says “the Foreign Office should now open serious discussions with the Islanders on their mode of return and to provide sufficient funding from UK and European sources to enable justice.”
In the meantime the Chagossians are preparing to fight on, in the European Court of Human Rights. Unless compelled by a higher power, the government won’t be changing its position, though a flunky, Chris Bryant, says “that is not to say that we do not want to do everything we can to support those people.”
That’s nice. But it doesn’t resurrect their rights. Expecting little else, hundreds of Chagossians have moved to Britain, after the government gave them passports a few years back. Some felt bought off, but a new life here appealed to many more than waiting for nothing elsewhere.
None of this changes much in principle. What the Washington Post once called an “act of mass kidnapping” remains a stain on Anglo-American foreign policy. And it continues to get swept under the carpets of power.
David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, took office trumpeting “the spread of democracy and good governance”. He says he regrets what his predecessors did. But he doesn’t plan on doing anything differently. So I hope he enjoyed reading the attached, if it ever crossed his desk en route to the shredder.
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