High Court Rules on Displacement of Chagos Islanders

The High Court in London ruled yesterday that the resettlement of native islanders from their homeland in the Indian Ocean was unlawful. The case of Bancoult v. Secretary of State is available here. The islands of the Chagos Archipelago are of no small significance to the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States leases the only inhabitable island, Diego Garcia, as a joint UK-US naval support facility. As noted here, coalition aircraft from Diego Garcia dropped more ordnance on Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan than any other unit in the Afghan war. In short, these islands are the most important military outpost in the Indian Ocean.

The story of the displacement of the Chagos Islanders is quite amazing. A timeline is available here. A brief excerpt from the lower court opinion, Chagos Islanders v. Attorney General , [2004] EWCA Civ. 997, provides an objective background on their story:

The Chagos Islands are an archipelago in the Indian Ocean which includes the island of Diego Garcia. During the 1960s the United States administration decided that it required Diego Garcia as a strategic military base. The government of the United Kingdom set about accommodating this request, but at an early stage realised that it and the neighbouring islands had a substantial population, mostly Seychellois contract workers, but some (known as the Ilois) springing from former slaves who had remained there after emancipation or from migrant labourers who had settled there. It decided that both Diego Garcia and the neighbouring islands needed to be cleared of their population. To accomplish these ends the islands were separated in 1965 from the British colony of Mauritius and (together with some other islands detached from the Seychelles) made a separate colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Mauritius itself in 1968 became an independent state. Its constitution gave Mauritian citizenship to everyone born in what had previously been the colony of Mauritius. This of course include the Chagos islanders, who were thereby entitled to settle in Mauritius. In 1967 the United Kingdom bought out the freehold interest of the company which now farmed copra on the islands and which employed virtually its entire population. It was the claimants’ case that those of them who went to Mauritius or the Seychelles for medical treatment and other things that could not be had on the islands were prevented from returning, and that the remainder were deported by ship. The defendants attributed the depopulation to the closure of the plantations on the islands. What is clear is that between 1967 and 1973 the entire population was removed to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where they had neither homes nor work…. It would be wrong of us to move on to the legal issues without acknowledging … the shameful treatment to which the islanders were apparently subjected. The deliberate misrepresentation of the Ilois’ history and status, designed to deflect any investigation by the United Nations; the use of legal powers designed for the governance of the islands for the illicit purpose of depopulating them; the uprooting of scores of families from the only way of life and means of subsistence that they knew; the want of anything like adequate provision for their resettlement: all of this and more is now part of the historical record. It is difficult to ignore the parallel with the Highland clearances of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Defence may have replaced agricultural improvement as the reason, but the pauperisation and expulsion of the weak in the interests of the powerful still gives little to be proud of.

Following an adverse ruling in 2004, the Prime Minister invoked an unusual procedural rule known as an Order-in-Council, which sought to reverse the judgment applicable to overseas territories without parliamentary action. It is this action that was declared unlawful by the High Court yesterday. According to news reports, in yesterday’s ruling the High Court held that “Prime Minster Tony Blair’s attempt to use a centuries-old power of the Queen called an Order in Council to bypass Parliament and quash an earlier court ruling in the natives’ favor was ‘irrational'” and that “the suggestion that a minister can, through an Order in Council, exile a whole population from a British Overseas Territory and claim he is doing so for the `peace, order and good government’ of the Territory is repugnant.” The High Court further noted that “The defendant’s approach to this case involves much clanking of the ‘chains of the ghosts of the past’.”

You can read details about the judgment from various news sources here. I would greatly appreciate any knowledgeable readers to provide further details on the use of Orders-in-Council generally or more information about this specific case.