UK/Diego Garcia: “The law gives and the law may take away”
01 November 2008
In October families sent into exile to Mauritius from their homes on the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean - to make way for a US military base - lost by a narrow 3-2 ruling their final appeal to the Law Lords to be allowed to return home. In 1968 up to 2,000 men, women and children were summarily evicted ("sanitised" as the Americans described it) from the islands to make way for the Diego Garcia airbase and banned from returning. The Law Lords maintained that prerogative orders made by the UK’s Queen preventing the islanders’ return were not unlawful, as had been argued at the High Court when the Chagossians won an earlier legal battle for the right to return to the sixty-five islands.
The royal prerogative order process used to evict the islanders has been described by John Pilger:
The cover-up went to the very top. On November 5 and 8 1965, the Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood, wrote two secret minutes to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in which he described the problem of a "population of 1,000 inhabitants" living in the Chagos. He urged that the Queen quickly approve the "order-in-council detaching the islands" so that the new colony could be declared and "we should be able to present the UN with a fait accompli.
So when Wilson gave the green light to the order-in-council, he was aware he was overriding the legal and human rights of British citizens. He was stealing their country and ignoring the risks of "dumping unemployables in heavily over-populated Mauritius…
Last July the Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that "there is a strong moral case for the UK permitting and supporting a return to the British Indian Ocean Territory for the Chagossians”, (See
Statewatch Supplement August 2008). Olivier Bancoult, who led the campaign for return, has pledged to continue the fight and said that he hoped the European Court would rule that the Chagos Islanders were protected by human rights legislation.
The Law Lords’ ruling accepts the British and United States governments’ argument that the return of the indigenous inhabitants, and their welfare, has no substance when balanced against the
potential for interference with the security of the Diego Garcia military base. The US had asserted that the islands
might be useful to terrorists and Lord Hoffman said that the UK government was entitled to legislate in its security interests. Lawyers had argued that the UK government did not have the power to remove the islanders’ right of abode, citing Magna Carta:
no freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned…or exiled, or otherwise destroyed… but by the lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land.
The outcome means that the Chagos islanders will continue to require immigration consent to visit their birthplace and the graves of their ancestors.
Moreover, the Law Lords ruling seems to accept the right of the United States to abduct civilians, remove them from the protection of the law and torture them with impunity. Earlier this year, the Foreign Affairs Committee condemned as “deplorable” that fact that “previous US assurances about rendition flights [to Diego Garcia] have turned out to be false”.
One’s birthright can be given or removed at the whim of powerful people or, as Lord Hoffman succinctly put it:
The law gives it and the law may take it away.
John Pilger “Out of Eden”:
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=351
“John Pilger cheers the islanders fighting dirty tricks” New Statesman 18.10.04: http://www.newstatesman.com/200410180014
Foreign Affairs Committee "Overseas Territories" 6.7.08
http://www.publications.uk/pa/cm/cmfaff.htm
“Order banning Chagos Islanders not unlawful” Times Law Report 23.10.08