The High Court’s refusal to let the Chagossians’ case proceed is, on any fair reading, a profoundly dispiriting judgment, one that acknowledges the “long and shameful history” of their treatment and then shuts the courtroom door anyway.
In Pompe and Mandarin v Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, handed down on 10 March 2026, Mrs Justice Stacey refused permission for a full judicial review hearing in a case brought by British Chagossians against the Labour Government over its handling of the Chagos deal with Mauritius. She concluded that every ground advanced by the claimants had been met by what she called a “clear knock out blow”.
That phrase will sting. So will the outcome.
Because stripped of legal jargon, what this means is simple: a people who were expelled from their homeland by a former Labour Government, whose treatment the courts themselves have repeatedly described as “shameful”, “callous”, and the “pauperisation and expulsion of the weak in the interests of the powerful”, have been told that they are still not entitled even to a full hearing on whether they should have been properly consulted before ministers negotiated away the future of their islands.
That is not a triumph of judicial restraint. It looks much more like judicial detachment.
The claimants’ case, led by Philip Rule KC, with James Tunbridge and Michael Polak, was not frivolous. It raised six recognisable public law grounds: lack of lawful consultation, irrationality, breach of the public sector equality duty, discrimination, procedural unfairness, and Article 8 and 14 human rights arguments. These were serious arguments brought by serious lawyers on behalf of serious people, British citizens whose lives and identity are bound up with the islands from which their families were removed.
And yet the judge’s core answer was that the case was really an attack on the Treaty itself, and that treaty-making and foreign affairs are, in substance, beyond the reach of judicial review. That conclusion sits at the centre of the ruling. Once she characterised the claim that way, the rest largely followed.
But that is precisely where criticism of the judgment begins.
The Chagossians were not asking the court to redraw the foreign policy map of the Indian Ocean. They were asking whether British ministers, before concluding an arrangement with Mauritius over sovereignty, had acted lawfully toward the very people whose homeland was at stake. That is not some exotic constitutional novelty. It is a classic public law question: when government decision-making has profound effects on a defined group, did ministers take lawful account of their interests and treat them fairly?
The court’s answer was effectively no, because the subject matter touched foreign affairs. But if the foreign affairs label is enough to displace scrutiny even where the Government is dealing with the aftermath of one of the ugliest episodes in modern British colonial history, then the label has become too powerful. It ceases to be a constitutional principle of restraint and starts becoming a shield against accountability.
The judgment repeatedly returns to one brutal proposition: the Chagossians never had a legal right of abode, and the Treaty takes away no right they currently possess. In formal terms, that is the spine of the reasoning. In moral and political terms, it is astonishingly cold.
Of course the Chagossians lack a right of abode. The British state removed them, excluded them, and has spent decades defending legal mechanisms that kept them out. To say now that they cannot complain because the latest arrangement deprives them of nothing they presently enjoy is to use the injustice of the past as the legal foundation for refusing justice in the present. The court did acknowledge the circularity of that logic. But it accepted it all the same.
That is why the judgment will strike many readers as so out of touch. It identifies the historic wrong in eloquent terms, then treats that wrong as legally inert when it matters most.
The consultation issue is especially troubling. The court held that ministerial statements about “engagement” did not amount to a clear promise to “consult”, and that no settled practice of consultation on sovereignty had arisen from previous exercises concerning resettlement or the marine protected area. Legally, that is a neat distinction. Politically and constitutionally, it is thin gruel.
If ministers repeatedly engage with Chagossian communities on the future of the islands, if they accept Chagossians are a distinct racial group for the purpose of the litigation, if they publicly say the negotiations include matters relating to “former inhabitants”, and if the final deal leaves Mauritius free, but not obliged, to permit resettlement on islands other than Diego Garcia, then the argument that there was no arguable duty even to consult is hardly absurd. It is at least a point a full court could have heard.
Instead, the claimants were turned away at the threshold.
The ruling on the Public Sector Equality Duty is another example of how a legally orthodox answer can still feel unsatisfactory. The court said section 149 of the Equality Act does not apply because the Treaty is to be implemented by primary legislation, and the statute expressly excludes decisions relating to primary legislation from the duty’s scope. That may prove hard to disturb on appeal. But it does not answer the broader democratic complaint: how can government accept Chagossians are a distinct racial group, negotiate a settlement that affects their future, and still escape any meaningful equality scrutiny at the crucial stage?
The human rights analysis is similarly bleak. The court said Articles 8 and 14 could not get off the ground because the BIOT cases have long established the territorial limits of Convention protection, and because the claimants are again confronted with the fact that they have no existing right of abode. Here too the judgment is doctrinally careful but morally cramped. The Chagossians’ complaint is not abstract. It concerns identity, ancestry, family connection, culture, burial, visitation, return, and the right not to be treated as incidental to decisions about one’s own homeland. The law may not currently be generous enough to recognise that complaint. But that is not the same thing as saying the complaint lacks force.
Then there is the timing.
The hearing took place on 28 October 2025. The judgment was not handed down until 10 March 2026, more than four months later. Mrs Justice Stacey expressly apologised, citing health issues and pressure of work. That explanation should be recorded fairly. Judges are human, and honesty about delay is better than silence.
But the timing still matters. It matters because this was not some minor procedural spat. It was an oral renewal in a case of constitutional significance, involving an exiled people, a contested treaty, and the future of British sovereign control. The judge herself noted that quick decisions are intended at or soon after oral renewal hearings. Instead, the parties waited for months.
And that delay becomes more politically sensitive because the judgment arrived just days before the next Chagos judicial review hearing due on Friday. People are entitled to ask why. They are entitled to ask whether this sequence is merely unfortunate coincidence or something else. They are entitled to ask, too, how Mauritian Attorney General Gavin Glover appeared to know last week that the judgment would be delivered on Tuesday.
There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. There may be an administrative explanation. There may be a professional explanation. But until one is given, the question will linger. In a case as politically combustible as this, opacity is corrosive. Courts depend on public confidence, and confidence is not strengthened when one side appears to have advance awareness of a judgment date before others do.
That does not prove impropriety. It does, however, justify scrutiny.
What happens next? The Chagossians have already indicated they will appeal. On the face of this judgment, that is plainly the right course.
Their best points on appeal are likely to focus on whether the judge set the bar too high at the permission stage, despite correctly reciting that arguability is a “low threshold”. She said permission is about whether there is a realistic prospect of success, not whether the claimants will probably win. Yet much of the judgment reads like a final merits determination. The court did not merely say the claims were weak. It engaged substantively, repeatedly, and conclusively, while refusing the claimants disclosure and a full hearing.
An appellate court may also be invited to look closely at whether the claim was characterised too broadly as a direct attack on treaty-making, when the claimants’ case was narrower: that ministers owed public law duties to a defined and historically wronged community when deciding how to proceed. That distinction matters. If it is accepted, some of the “knockout” reasoning begins to wobble.
The Chagossians will also say that the court treated the absence of present rights as decisive when that very absence is the product of the historic wrong the state now accepts. Put differently, the Government should not be able to say: you were expelled, you were denied return, you therefore have no existing right, and because you have no existing right, you need not be consulted when we decide the future of your homeland. That is not justice. That is a closed loop.
Will they win on appeal? No honest commentator can promise that. Public law appeals in foreign affairs cases are difficult, and the case law the Government relies on is real. But can they mount a serious appeal with real legal points? Absolutely. And if the Court of Appeal is prepared to distinguish between challenging the content of a treaty and challenging the lawfulness of the Government’s treatment of British Chagossians in the run-up to that treaty, then this case is not finished.
It should not be finished.
For too long, Chagossians have been treated as a footnote to diplomacy, an inconvenience to strategy, and a moral embarrassment to be acknowledged in speeches but sidelined in decisions. This judgment, for all its civility and legal citation, risks continuing that tradition. It says, in effect, that everyone can agree the Chagossians were wronged, while nobody in power is legally required to ask them before deciding what happens next.
That is why this ruling feels so bleak. Not because it is angry, but because it is composed. Not because it denies history, but because it accepts history and still declines to act.
The judiciary should be a place where historic injustice is met with exacting scrutiny, especially when government once again makes decisions over the heads of the very people it harmed. In this case, the court chose distance over scrutiny.
The Chagossians deserve better. And the law, if it is to command respect, should be capable of more than telling the dispossessed that the consequences of their dispossession are now too deeply embedded to challenge.
Claire Bullivant
That’s not a surprise from a British Court, always always missing the point !