Book review : The last colony : a tale of exile, justice and Britain’s colonial legacy

Abstract

The Chagos issue has been discussed over several decades, either through the lens of the plight of the people forcibly removed from their land by the United Kingdom, or that of the sovereignty claims of Mauritius. Whilst public opinion, especially in Europe and some sections of the Mauritian media, has tended to focus on the suffering of the former inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago, the Mauritian government’s focus has mainly been on its claim concerning sovereignty over the islands. Prof Philippe Sands was appointed lead Counsel for Mauritius in 2010, when a challenge to the legality of the UK declaration of a Marine Protected Area was filed before a UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) arbitration tribunal. In this, his latest book, Sands deals with both dimensions of the issue, intertwined with contemporaneous global events, and especially those dealing with decolonisation and developments in international law. (Occasionally, he even mentions the songs at the top of the charts at the time that these events were taking place!) As a lawyer and former Mauritius Ambassador to the United Nations, I have had the privilege of working alongside Professor Sands on the Chagos issue for about five years and was always impressed with his strong sense of commitment to the cause he was fighting for. This comes out strongly in his book. He tells the story of a dispute raised first before an international arbitration tribunal and later before the International Court of Justice, often involving novel points of international law as he recounts the early life of a young girl born in the Chagos, her deportation to mainland Mauritius and subsequent adult life in a land so different from her own, with no prospect of returning to the islands where her ancestors lived and where she grew up. [excerpt]