Dr Dan Boucher explains why claims that the UK could face billions in compensation if it fails to ratify the Mauritius Treaty are legally implausible, politically misleading, and morally incoherent — particularly in light of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s intervention and the unresolved rights of the Chagossian people.
The assertion by officials, reported by The Times, The Telegraph, The Mail, etc., on 22 February, that if the Government does not ratify the Mauritius Treaty the Mauritians will be able to secure billions of pounds of compensation, is not credible.
This is fairly desperate stuff from the Government, on a par with the suggestion made by Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, on 20 January, when he said that we have to ratify the treaty because we signed it.
The whole point of the distinction between signing and ratification is that while signing is done provisionally by the executive, ratification can only follow domestic scrutiny by the legislature and its agreement to pass the requisite legislation to facilitate treaty implementation.
Until ratification, the two parties are not bound, and neither can reasonably seek compensation from the other if either fails to secure domestic consent and is unable to ratify.
Moreover, the implication that the UK would somehow ‘wrong’ Mauritius if its domestic processes do not facilitate ratification has an anti-democratic implication that the international community can ill afford to seek to accommodate. It suggests that governments can reasonably be expected simply to impose things on their parliaments, regardless of what they think.
Furthermore, in this case the idea that Mauritius would be able to seek compensation is even more problematic because the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a key organ of the rules-based international order, has used the gap between signing and ratification to intervene.
It has published a formal ‘Decision’ (see below) which is not just critical of the content of the Treaty from a racial discrimination perspective.
Its concerns are such that it has formally called on the UK and Mauritius to suspend ratification and go back to the drawing board, making both the provision of self-determination for the Chagossians and their right of resettlement non-negotiable.
Thus, far from non-ratification justifying billions in compensation to the Mauritians, it is what is required of both the UK and Mauritius following the intervention of a key organ of the rules-based international order.
Moreover, and of huge importance, the UN Committee also makes the critical point that the only relevant compensation claims in play here are those of the Chagossians, not the Mauritians.
Its call for the treaty not to be ratified also urges that the rights of the Chagossians to ‘effective remedies and full repatriation, including restitution [and] compensation’ should be met.
It was the Chagossians who were forcibly removed from their islands between 1968 and 1973, and who have since been kept in forced exile for approaching 60 years, not the Mauritians. Indeed, the Mauritians helped facilitate this forced removal by agreeing to provide one of the key places to which the Chagossians were forcibly relocated.
In this context, in order to really appreciate the absurdity of the suggestion that we should pay the Mauritians billions in compensation, we need to consider it in light of what the Government has said about paying compensation to the Chagossians.
On 5 January, when challenged on the need to pay compensation to the Chagossians, both for their forced removal from the Chagos Islands and their subjection to enforced exile for nearly 60 years, the minister in the Lords suggested that this had been met by a payment of £2 million in 1982.
Given that the £2 million payment came with no admission of liability – since conceded – and made no provision for compensating the Chagossians for their continued exile after 1982, it is morally indefensible to validate claims that Mauritius could seek billions while insisting that the Chagossians were fully compensated in 1982. It reflects a government that has lost its moral compass.
In this context, rather than validating the idea of Mauritian compensation claims that lack credibility, it would have been better had officials said that, given that both the UK and Mauritius have formally been told by a key organ of the rules-based international order not to ratify, the UK must instead inform Mauritius that both countries must abandon treaty ratification and go back to the drawing board.
The rules-based international order has provided us with an exit strategy from a terrible treaty, and Labour should seize it and develop a new approach, working with the Chagossian Government in Exile, that is based on self-determination for the Chagossian people and the Chagossians’ right of resettlement, which is now being asserted on Peros Banhos.
Dr Dan Boucher
Dr Boucher has a PHD in sovereignty and international relations.
A Copy of the UN Committee Decision:
