Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

My Lords, I introduce Amendment 29 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, who is prevented by a family illness from being here. His amendment draws attention to the contradiction between the principles in this Bill and some of the UN resolutions dealing with when it is valid to partition a territory. The legal case on which the Government rest, as we established in the last round of amendments, is fundamentally UN Resolution 1514, which was the basis of the Mauritian claim that it was wrong to have divided the territory at independence. This is an extraordinary precedent to set. The idea that if a territory, for reasons of administrative convenience, was at one time governed from somewhere else, that creates a lasting claim, would upend borders on every continent and in every archipelago. It would mean that Aden and Somaliland are again governed from India, and that the Cayman Islands are again governed from Jamaica. If we extend beyond British territories, it would mean that the Philippines were governed from Mexico, and that Bolivia was again governed from my native Peru, which was the seat of the viceroyalty. It would be an extraordinary principle. Indeed, when read in context, the UN is not arguing that. If it did, it would have opposed the split of Czechoslovakia, the independence of Montenegro from Serbia, and so on. Of course it does not argue that. The three resolutions referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, essentially establish criteria where it is proper to divide a territory for reasons of geography, history, ethnic distinction or nationality—a sense of being a people and wanting to live in your own polity. As we just heard from my noble friend Lord Lilley, all those criteria are plainly met in this case. When the Chagos Islands were ceded by the French in 1814, they were ceded as a separate territory from Mauritius. They are populated by a different population, one that came from the west rather than from the east. The only reason that they were governed from Mauritius was not because they were part of Mauritius but because there is nowhere among those sparse and beautiful atolls suitable for a seat of government. It is similar to some of our continuing overseas territories in the Atlantic today, visited occasionally by a governor because there is no permanent seat there. This is the key group of amendments—and the crux of the entire debate is the question of consulting the people who have the most at stake. They are the only people who have ever constituted a permanent population of that archipelago and their descendants, the people defined in this Bill as the citizens of the BIOT. My noble friend Lord Lilley gave a very good example: the consultation between the Ellice Islands and the Gilbert Islands at the moment of independence. They felt that they had not enough in common to accept government from each other’s hands, so the Ellice Islands became the monarchy of Tuvalu and the Gilbert Islands became the Republic of Kiribati. The distances here, ethnically and geographically, are much wider. There is not much doubt that if we had carried out a consultation in 1965, we would have had the same outcome as in the case cited by my noble friend. Why does that suddenly stop being true now? Why does the passage of time invalidate that claim? This is a proposal to hand the Chagossian people to a nation that has never governed them, never seen them as part of their demos, that was very happy to renounce all claims in perpetuity and trouser a cash sum in exchange for doing so, and which has continued to treat the archipelago in essentially pecuniary terms. Why not test the proposition today? I repeat a point made by my noble friend Lord Bellingham at Second Reading. It is perfectly logistically feasible to conduct a referendum across scattered territories. Last year I voted for our absent colleague—my noble friend Lord Hague of Richmond—to be Chancellor of the University of Oxford. There was a poll that was conducted electronically across five continents, the alumni being dispersed in their tens of thousands. There was a simple enough process. You establish the right of somebody to vote, you establish their identity, you show that they genuinely are an alumnus, then you have the vote. We have established who would be eligible here, and the right of descent that conveys BIOT citizenship. I refuse to believe that it is logistically beyond us to consult the Chagossian people. I cannot speak for everyone on this side, but I am pretty sure that if the Chagossian people voted overwhelmingly for Mauritian citizenship, opposition to this proposal would dissipate and people would accept it as a valid exercise of self-determination. There is something more than perverse about acting in the name of decolonisation when taking a people against their will and transferring them to the sovereignty of a foreign state, a country whose Prime Minister at the time of the partition said that it is a territory which they never visit and of which they know little. When I was a Member of the European Parliament, Crawley was part of my constituency. I got to know some of the disparate groups that represent our Chagossian fellow subjects, and it is fair to say that they did not always agree on every issue—like many small communities, they had a broad diversity of opinions on a lot of subjects—but honestly, hand on heart, I do not think I ever recall meeting any Chagossian in this country who wanted to be a citizen of Mauritius. There are reasons for that. The experience of Chagossians in Mauritius was not a happy one: they were confined in slums, and they were subjected to, in their eyes, racism and discrimination. The idea that we are now placing this entire population, against their will, because of a non-binding opinion from a tribunal without jurisdiction is a truly extraordinary and shameful moment.