The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy

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Sands notes the irony of Britain claiming sovereignty over one set of islands against the wishes of the inhabitants when compared with its attitude toward a different set of remote islands in a different ocean:

I think it transformed the perceptions of the judges who felt she is not some distant theoretical account, this is real, about real people today.” In 2019, as a result of the hearings involving Elysé’s testimony, the judges at The Hague stated that the UK is under “…an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, and that all member states must cooperate with the United Nations to complete the decolonisation of Mauritius”. At the same time that Brexiter government ministers were standing up in parliament to suggest that international law could be broken in certain circumstances and Tories boasted about plans to tear up human rights, the UN general assembly voted by an overwhelming majority in favour of setting a six-month deadline for the UK to withdraw from the Chagos Archipelago. The ruling hardly made the news. An illustration by Martin Rowson from The Last Colony. The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will.As for the unravelling of colonialism, and the (sometimes) accident of historical conquest, I find Sands’s comments about the 2019 vote and the Maldives support of Britain for reasons entirely unclear somewhat disingenuous. Fishing rights and the much closer distances to Chagos from Maldives (compared to Mauritius) might have something to do with this? Mr Sands makes some pertinent points in his book about reasons for the 2019 judgement and a possible alteration in the thinking of the Foreign office. Sands also makes the following points about context Some two thousand people who had lived on the islands of Chagos for generations, many the direct descendants of enslaved people brought there from Mozambique and Madagascar in the 18th century by the French and British, were deported overnight from their island paradise as the result of a secret decision by the British government to provide the United States with land to construct a military base in the Indian Ocean. The government appealed to the House of Lords, which overturned the judgement. The Lords ruled that “Her Majesty in council” was “entitled to legislate for a colony in the interests of the United Kingdom”, and that, in the event of a conflict of interest between the UK and the colony, was entitled “to prefer the interests of the United Kingdom”. Amid the ongoing culture wars over British history and the legacies of empire, Sands’ book is an urgent reminder that Britain’s colonial rule isn’t our past. It’s our present.

He spoke to The Irish Times in advance of his trip to Dublin on Thursday to deliver the Free Legal Advice Centre’s (Flac) annual justice lecture. Eighty-nine nations voted in favour of Resolution 1514, none voted against and nine abstained, including Britain, France, the US and Australia. The British delegate said it could accept self-determination as a principle, but not a “legal right”, and said nothing about territorial integrity. Chagos, the NI protocol, the discussion of a Swiss-style agreement are, he believes, “a recognition of that which cannot yet be talked about openly, that Britain has cast itself into a wilderness and something will have to be done”. Change “will take time” but will come, he believes, predicting Britain will have reconnected with Europe within 10 years. The heart of the ICJ decision on Chagos is about the will of the people, he says. “In 1965, the will of the people did not express support for the dismemberment of their country.” There is a but. “The climate change issue is very worrisome indeed, there I don’t know what the law is going to do. The law is dependent on political will, if the political will is not there, the law can’t deliver.”The Last Colony is not his first work to champion investigations of 21st century government law-breaking. It follows others involving the US military prison on Guantánamo Bay; the secret collusion between Bush and Blair over the Iraq War; and the trial of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. There was, Sands says, “a silence, that moment when she spoke to the court, an individual who was at the heart of this complicated legal story. She brought it to life in a different way. ‘Real people’

In conclusion it is clear from his book, and the parts where Sands expresses a personal opinion, that his concern for liberty and the rights of the individual is limited to those parts of the Chagossian archipelago that do not include Diego Garcia. Perhaps the sentiments expressed (again in Sands’s book) by the Crawley Chagossian exiles about being allowed to work at the US base, will be some tiny recompense. I think not The use of firsthand accounts of the Chagossians in this book brings their suffering to life and breaks up the legalistic nature of the rest of the text. When I listened to the voice of Liseby, brought brilliantly to life by the narration of Adjoa Andoh, it was easy to see why her testimony moved the ICJ to rule in the Chagossians' favour. I think this book is perfect to consume in audio format for this reason, and because Philippe makes the legal parts of the book easy to digest. To understand my gripe in Sands’ book :his failure to clearly Philippe Sands is a very adept broadcaster, writer and presenter in the literary world. He writes predominantly non fiction and he is unusual, if not unique, in combing the above with practicing as a barrister and lecturing as a Professor, in the field of international law. He is President of English PEN. Having heard him speak a few times now I know him to be very competent inbdealing with subject matter which invariably shows people at their very worst. Sands himself has mastered the art of getting serious, technical, subject matter across to a wider public via his commercially successful books, most recently East West Street and Ratline . His books contain human interest stories which set up the legal and technical messages in ways that an academic text book can’t always achieve.The thing is, living in post-Brexit Britain, this new status quo on the international stage isn't being reported widely. I feel quite suffocated by the gas-lighting that goes on in the media and as each year of the new Brexit dawn winds on, the angrier I feel. They removed my freedom of movement - the option to leave this awful country is made much harder, and the feeling of brotherhood with those nations across the water has been slashed. We are on our own. In The Guardian, Feb 2022 Sands “believes the UK’s hardline resistance is partially because it fears that handing over the BIOT would set a precedent for the loss of the Falklands and Gibraltar. “But there’s no other UK [territory] that involves a case of [territorial] dismemberment [before independence]” I have never been attracted to international law and war crimes tribunals due to both the above truisms. Those guilty of “Crimes against humanity” are only the military personnel of the country that lost a war and never the victorious military personnel. Victims are only victims, from a Western European perspective, if they are white. Powerful countries, the previous “winners,” only atone for their sins if it is politically and militarily convenient. These are all, unfortunately, major points in Philippe Sands’ book, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage, chronicling the legal arguments of Chogossian refugees who were forcibly relocated from an archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean to make way for a military base that has been leased by the British to the U.S.A. since the early 70’s. This base contains much of the U.S.A.’s early response capabilities to any conflict in the Middle East. Pre-positioned ships are always ready for a war and a mere few days from potential hotspots. Call the forced relocation what it is: A move by two powerful countries, Britain and the U.S.A., who had both ostensibly renounced colonialism, to continue behaving like colonialists in spite of numerous decisions in international courts which, over the last decades, gradually favor the rights of indigenous peoples. The Last Colony is a reminder to question the sound bites issued by the politicians and media - start from the premise that they have a hidden agenda. International laws and treaties were clearly simply a nuisance for both governments to be overcome. The UK's attempts at self-justification and deceit are completely and systematically exposed by the author and his team of researchers. The research is so extensive and detailed that the book requires re-reading and much mark-up to remind the reader of the many obstacles encountered and resolutions achieved.

The Chagossians had been trying to leverage the legal system for decades. One effort was driven by a man named Olivier Bancoult, who was just a boy on Île du Coin when he and his family were forced to leave. Bancoult leads an organization called the Chagos Refugees Group and has argued in British courts that the eviction was illegal and that the victims have a right of return. He actually won his first case, in 2000, but the British government brushed it aside after 9/11—no point aggravating the Americans as they waged a war on terror. (Diego Garcia was reportedly used as a transit point for rendition flights.) The second effort—in the World Court—was driven by Mauritius, for its own purposes. Mauritius, represented by a team that includes Sands, argued that the detachment of Chagos by Britain had been based on blatant falsehoods and that the detachment and the expulsions were illegal. In 2019, the World Court ruled against Britain, a judgment endorsed by the UN General Assembly not long afterward. In February 2022, with those victories in hand, Mauritian officials and a group of Chagossians mounted a trip to the archipelago: Mauritius to assert a claim, the Chagossians to visit the islands of their birth—the first time they had done so without a British military escort.There are several ways to tell this story, but Sands, who represented Mauritius in international tribunals in its attempts to recover the Chagos, uses the lens of international law. He starts with his key witness in the final case at The Hague just a few years ago: He has noted “a certain hesitation” about the idea of Irish unity among his friends in Ireland “which has surprised me and, I must confess, slightly disappointed me”. ICJ and Chagos Sands’s book began as a series of lectures delivered to The Hague Academy of International Law, and as a narrative it betrays those discursive origins. While examining the displacement of the island people, many of whom have died in exile, Sands also sketches out the history of the international court of justice in The Hague, and its incremental role in dismantling colonial structures around the world, the inching forward of freedoms. Sands makes a steely and forensic case, laced with human empathy, against successive British foreign ministers The brutal expulsion of the Chagos Islanders wasn’t a wholesale massacre but it was a staged, cruel process which attracted little attention. UK has defied international law -and common humanity. L’ultima colonia, tradotto da Elisa Banfi, ha un nucleo centrale rappresentato da una serie di conferenze tenute da Sands all’Accademia Internazionale di Diritto dell’Aja, e una parte “personale” affidata alla storia di Liseby Elysé. E’ un libro più specialistico di La strada verso est, che tradisce le sue origini didattiche, pur avendo una notevole piacevolezza di scrittura. Ma è anche un libro che invita a riflettere su alcuni temi di rilievo internazionale, anche se apparentemente a noi lontani: vedi la cosiddetta “eccezione inglese” che ha permesso al Regno Unito, in piena era di decolonizzazione, di dare nel 1968 l’indipendenza alle Mauritius, ma di tenersi le Chagos con un’operazione di “distacco illecito” dalle Mauritius- e addirittura di svuotarle per concederle agli americani, che da cui avrebbero in seguito lanciato l’attacco all’Iraq.