Contribution
In the absence of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, I should like to move the amendment standing in his name. Amendments 3 and 4 are about the rights of Chagossians to bear children in the archipelago and the rights of people born in the archipelago to continued British Overseas Territories citizenship. So as not to detain your Lordships any longer than necessary, I will also speak to my own Amendment 50 in this group, which is about registering married Chagossians as British Indian Ocean Territory citizens.
The Minister has just repeated that she deeply regrets the treatment of Chagossians over the decades, and I believe her. She is obviously sincere and has said that on many previous occasions. In our debate last month, she described it as appalling and morally shameful; she said that they had been badly treated over many decades. So I pose the question: what is adequate restitution for this appalling treatment, which all sides seem to agree is deeply shameful? What would constitute a way of making good a wrong in a way that is understood morally and legally? What we mean by restitution, of course, is restoring something. If you have taken something from someone, restitution means giving it back or compensating them to an equivalent value.
I am afraid that all arguments end up in the same place: the restitution sought by Chagossians for those 60 years was the right to return to the homeland from which they had been plucked and then dumped hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of miles away in strange new lands. I want the Committee to think for a moment about what a return would be like: to imagine the resettlement of the atolls around Diego Garcia, if not of the base itself, with the coconut groves coaxed back into order, their fronds trimmed; children born in the islands being taught by their elders how to husk and split the coconuts; villages on the shore, with their bright roofs rising above the takamaka and banyan trees. Imagine the old churches being reconstituted and the coral stone being used. All of that is what is being sought by our fellow subjects of Chagossian origin, as British Indian Ocean Territory citizens, and it is not available under any alternative plan.
Mauritius recognises a right to settle in the island for Mauritians, under whom it includes Chagossians. But what is being proposed by Mauritius is the dissolution of BIOT citizenship into Mauritian citizenship, equivalent in the Seychelles, and now the equivalent for us. This is something that is unprecedented. I do not think that we have ever done this before. Yes, of course, when we have transferred jurisdiction as a withdrawing colonial power, we have transferred citizenship: you become a Kenyan or whatever it is. But I cannot think of any precedent where you remove somebody’s citizenship and instead give them citizenship of a country to which they feel no loyalty at all. As long as this wrong endures—as long as people feel that they do not have the nationality on their passport that they feel in their hearts—there will not be any stability.
The Minister spoke in the last round about why we should not reopen what was defined by the courts as a final, full and binding settlement. Well, it will not be final. By the way, that is what Mauritius agreed to in 1965, when it was paid to renounce all of its claims; reparations are never fully final. The deprivation of Chagossians of the citizenship that they want, that they want for their children and that past Governments legislated for—we amended the Nationality Act 1981 in 2022 in order precisely to create this status—is not going to result in a full and final settlement. On the contrary, there will be as much rejection of that new dispensation from the people most directly involved as there was recently from the Mauritians of the existing status quo. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if the part of the Chagossian population that rejects the deal constitutes itself as a Government-in-exile and begins to seek recognition. The idea that we are doing all of this in order to settle something quietly so that it all goes away is going to be tested by events—I hope I am wrong about this, but I suspect not. We are going to look back and think, “Why did we not see this coming?”
There is a way of going back to what was our plan as recently as 2015: looking at the places in the archipelago that can be resettled without prejudice to the base, allowing those people then to work in the civilian jobs, which are currently done mainly by Filipinos and Sri Lankans and so on, on Diego Garcia itself. It could be that this whole rap becomes what the Falklands war was to that archipelago: the beginning of an economic renaissance as Britain begins to take an interest in its overseas possession and begins to create active economic opportunities for the people there, whether servicing the military facilities or in fishing or whatever it is. But none of that is going to happen if we simply declare that our Chagossian fellow citizens are really just misguided Mauritians and that they have no more particular right to their ancestral homelands and to the graves of their ancestors than any other Mauritian citizen. It is in your Lordships’ power to put a stop to this and not to ratify this treaty. As our national poet said:
“Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so,
Lest child, child’s children, cry against you woe!”