Al Pinkerton: "The Chagossians have been dispossessed again"

Al Pinkerton, the new Liberal Democrat MP for Surrey Heath, posted a thread on Twitter last night that gave a perspective that had been missing from the day's heated debate on the Chagos Islands. It was that of the Islanders themselves.

Here is the full thread:

A few weeks ago, I became a member of the Chagos APPG, Vice Chair of the APPG on Gibraltar and the Secretary of the Falklands APPG. It would be fair to say I have more than a passing interest in U.K. Overseas Territories and a fair bit of accumulated knowledge.

A few key points:

1. The Chagos decision has no legal bearing whatsoever on the sovereignty of the Falklands, Gibraltar or the U.K. Sovereign Bases. The prominent conservative commentators who are opportunistically making that claim play into the hands of counter-claimants.

2. It was the Tories (Truss and Cleverly, in particular) who began the process of negotiating away the Chagos islands following the 2019 ICJ advisory + the 2021 ITLOS judgement. Cries of “weak, weak, weak” are deeply hypocritical.

3. While the U.K.-Mauritius agreement announced this week is consistent with international law, it is, in my opinion, a disgraceful abandonment of the Chagossian people, who have been serially failed by the U.K. since the 1960s.

4. Dispossessed and forcibly displaced from their islands by the U.K. in the 1960s-70s, Chagossians have now been dispossessed again through the bizarre spectacle of the ICJ giving force to a kind of ‘judicial colonialism’ by Mauritius.

5. The U.K.-Mauritius deal may be a “triumph of diplomacy” (as Biden has apparently claimed), but it’s also a distasteful reminder that, in 2024, the rights of a people to self-determine their future can be still be merrily set aside for the maintenance of western geo-strategy.

6. MPs should be given time to scrutinise and debate this decision next week. The right of Chagossians (who are UK citizens, or have the right to be) to determine their own future deserves to be heard in Westminster. Anything less risks legalised colonialism by the back door.

Owen Bowcott has detailed the Chagos Islanders long struggle for justice in an article for the Guardian.

As so often, it's the continuities between the Conservative and Labour approaches to this question that strike you, not the differences.