Member

“Had we been afforded the treatment the judgment says we should have been afforded before moving to detach, namely ‘the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned’ in a ‘self-determination referendum’, it is no more likely that the people of the Chagos Islands would have self-determined to be part of Mauritius, a country 1,339 miles away with which, in 1965, we had virtually no contact, than it was that the Ellice Islands would have voted to remain joined to the Gilbert Islands”.