The Chagos Islands Cases: The Empire Strikes Back

Governance requires the accommodation of multiple interests in the cause of decision making. However, undue regard for particular sectional interests can take their toll upon public faith in government administration. Historically, broad conceptions of the good of the commonwealth were regularly employed to outweigh the interests of groups that stood in the way of colonisation. In the decision making and jurisprudence of the British Empire, the standard approach for justifying the marginalisation of the interests of colonised groups was that they were uncivilised and that particular hardships were the price to be paid for bringing to them the imperial dividend of industrial society. It is widely assumed that with the dismantling of the British Empire, such impulses and their consequent jurisprudence became a thing of the past. Even as decolonisation proceeded apace after the Second World War, however, the United Kingdom maintained control of strategically important islands with a view towards sustaining its global role. In the most infamous example of this postscript to the British Empire, in the 1960s these imperial interests were employed to justify the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Into the twenty-first century, this forced elision of the UK’s interests with the imperial “common good” continues to take centre stage in courtroom battles over the rights of the islanders, being cited before national and international tribunals in order to exclude the Chagos islanders from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have often failed to address the Chagossians’ interests, let alone reverse their expulsion.