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The Chagos Islands cases: the empire strikes back

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 22:12 authored by Tom Frost, C R G Murray
Good 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 employed to outweigh the interests of groups that resisted colonisation. In the decision making 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 accompanying 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 an infamous example from this twilight period of empire, in the 1960s imperial interests were used 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 islanders’ rights, being cited before domestic and international tribunals in order to maintain the Chagossians’ exclusion from their homeland. This article considers the new jurisprudence of imperialism which has emerged in a string of decisions which have continued to marginalise the Chagossians’ interests.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly

ISSN

0029-3105

Publisher

Sls Legal Publications

Issue

3

Volume

66

Page range

263-288

Department affiliated with

  • Law Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2015-08-24

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2015-11-24

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2015-08-22

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