Lord Morrow (DUP)

My Lords, I wish to speak to the six amendments to which I have attached my name in this grouping—Amendments 23 to 25, 27, 52 and 53—and also in support of Amendment 32. I will begin with Amendment 24. Since Committee there have been a number of critical developments, to which some noble Lords have already referred today. The rationale for the Bill and the treaty to which it relates was that they are essential if we are to uphold the international rules-based order. Yet on 2 December a key organ of the rules-based international order, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a formal decision, the substance of which I must put on the record. The decision: “Calls upon Mauritius and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to suspend the ratification of the bilateral agreement”, and: “Urges Mauritius and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to engage immediately with the Chagossian people … and to respect and guarantee their human rights under the Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including: Their right to return to their ancestral lands in Diego Garcia Island; Their right to self-determination while ensuring the full and meaningful participation of the Chagossian people in all decision-making processes impacting them and their land; Their cultural rights, including their access to cultural and spiritual sites and to preserve their cultural heritage; Their right to effective remedies and full repatriation, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition”. Thus, we are confronted not simply by an organ of the rules-based international order criticising the Mauritius treaty and the Bill but by a call for the suspension of treaty ratification. It is particularly striking that this decision flatly contradicts what the Minister said on 18 November, when she asserted that self-determination does not pertain to the Chagossian people. From the perspective of the rules-based international order, it clearly does apply to them. That is why it is imperative that we vote for Amendment 32, eloquently spoken on by the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. If the Government are intent on continuing with ratification, your Lordships’ House faces an immense responsibility because we constitute the one other means by which ratification can be suspended for 13 months if we refuse to give the Bill a Third Reading. In the intervening period there can be time for a rethink and the development of a response to the presenting difficulty that, rather than abstracting and thereby distorting one principle of international law above all others—colonial territorial integrity—places that principle in its proper relationship to self-determination. Obviously, I hope that when the Minister responds, she will indicate that the Government will not pursue the treaty to ratification. If she does not, the responsibility we face will be very clear. Quite apart from all the other problems with the treaty and the Bill, the fact that they undermine the rules-based international order, rather than upholding it, demonstrates why this treaty and Bill must and should be abandoned. On Amendment 23, quite apart from the fact that no territorial integrity is absolute in the sense that it is subject to self-determination—as the history of Czechoslovakia eloquently testifies—this point is greatly compounded in relation to territorial integrities that have been imposed by imperial powers, such as that pertaining to the colonial unit that covered Mauritius and the Chagos Islands prior to 8 November 1965. In this regard, it is quite impossible to understand the great wrong done to the Chagossian people if we have regard only to their forced removal. The root of the difficulty goes back to the decision to deny them the right of self-determination in 1965, which, if provided, would have made their forced removal between 1968 and 1973 unthinkable. In this context, neither the advisory judgment nor anything else in international law states that it is wrong for the territorial integrity of a colonial unit to be changed prior to decolonisation if this change is made to give effect to the principle of self-determination. This point is eloquently demonstrated by the experience of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which provide arguably the most relevant comparator to Mauritius and the Chagos Islands. Although the Gilbert Islands and the Ellice Islands were separated by 800 miles and comprised different people groups, they were in the same colonial unit. When the UK Government proposed decolonisation, the representatives of the Ellice Islands strongly objected to the notion of a new independent sovereign state consisting of the two sets of islands because, quite apart from the distance between them and the fact that they were from different people groups, the population of the Gilbert Islands was far greater than that of the Ellice Islands, such that the latter would be condemned to being permanently outvoted by what they regarded as another country. The UK Government responded by suggesting a self-determination referendum, in which the options were the Ellice Islands remaining part of the same jurisdiction as the Gilbert Islands or becoming a separate jurisdiction in their own right. Although not everyone supported separation, a very clear majority did. The UK then detached the Ellice Islands in 1976, creating a separate colony that went on to become the independent state of Tuvalu in 1978, while the Gilbert Islands became the independent state of Kiribati in 1979. The imperative for the provision of a self-determination referendum for the Chagossians in 1965 was even greater than that pertaining to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands because the distance between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands was significantly greater, as was the population differential, with the Chagossians standing at far greater risk of being permanently outvoted by the Mauritians. There was and is, however, an even greater imperative for the provision of a self-determination referendum for the Chagossians, which is testified to by the definition of the presenting difficulty by the advisory opinion, page 1 of which states: “Between 1814 and 1965, the Chagos Archipelago was administered by the United Kingdom as a dependency of the colony of Mauritius”. Crucially, therefore, the Chagos Islands’ relationship with Mauritius was never on all fours, rather giving effect to colonialism within a colony such that, rather than being a full part of the colony of Mauritius, the Chagos Islands were only ever “a dependency of the colony of Mauritius”. Being on all fours is central to being part of the same territorial integrity, for the reasons set out by the UN resolutions set out in Amendment 23. The absence of complete equality of citizenship demonstrates not the negation of colonialism but its presence. This, however, was completely absent, as demonstrated by the failure of the constitution of the colony of Mauritius to make provision for the election of representatives of the Chagos Islands to the Mauritian Legislative Council. All this sets out the very clear imperative for our voting in support of Amendment 32. This takes me neatly to Amendment 25. The Mauritius treaty implies that the Chagossians want to be part of Mauritius, such that the change in the territorial integrity of the Chagos Islands back to pre-November 1965 days, when the islands were a dependency of Mauritius, is the right and proper thing to do. There are, however, four major difficulties with this. In the first instance, as a dependency of Mauritius rather than a full part of Mauritius, the Chagossians were, even at the happiest time of the relationship with Mauritius—