A long fight

T he 40 year struggle of the Chagossian islanders for justice after they were summarily evicted by Britain from their Indian Ocean archipelago colony to make way for a United States airbase came to an end on Thursday when the European Court of Human Rights rejected the Chagossian's claim for compensation on the grounds that the Chagos islands were beyond the Court's legal reach. I have written several times over twenty years in the Bulletin about the disgraceful way in which Britain treated the Chagossians in the first place -- by uprooting them from their homes and work and forcing them to kill their animals -- and later as UK legal judgements in their favour on the illegality of the British action were ignored by successive British governments, in one case by invoking an archaic procedure used by Tudor monarchs. The exiled people of Chagos were left as a last resort to appeal to the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg with the disappointing result on a legal point rather than the substance of their case..

Yesterday, belatedly, Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague said that he is now ready to consider reversing the forced deportation of the islanders although, he said, “there are fundamental difficulties with resettlement”.

For what it's worth Mr Hague's offer is welcome but it is scandalous that it has taken the Foreign Office forty years to make it.