A collection of Chagossian human rights groups has referred Keir Starmer and other British officials to the International Criminal Court over the Chagos Surrender. He won’t like that…
The group says the referral – under Article 15 of the Rome Statute – is on the “basis of participation in forcible deportation, persecution, and other inhumane acts constitutive of crimes against humanity. The Chagossian human rights situation has deteriorated to the point of irreversible harm, especially given recent developments in Mauritius, and senior members of the British government are personally responsible for enabling this disaster to occur.” Chagossians are famously treated as third class citizens by Mauritian authorities, who seek to ban them from the Chagos islands…
The group goes into some details as to what evidence the ICC prosecutor will be leafing through:
“Many of the Chagossian population in Mauritius have been departed Mauritius with few belongings and the literal clothes on their backs since October. They are being harassed and driven out, under the diplomatic and political cover of the Treaty. Hillingdon and Crawley Councils, as ports for asylee entry, have been overwhelmed to the point that there have even been cases of newly arrived Chagossians sleeping rough on the streets. Senior members of government in the UK have been aware of these departures en-masse from Mauritius, and acquiesced to them as an apparently acceptable consequence of British foreign policy.”
Over August Chagossian representatives have also sent emergency requests to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The campaign against the increasingly expensive Chagos Surrender goes on…
Speaking to Adam Boulton on Times Radio about kicking the Golders Green suspect, Heidi Alexander said:
“I thought that if I was in the shoes of that police officer, then if I’m honest, given the situation, and the fact that he had a backpack on his back, and they were worried about whether that might go off, I could, if I was a police officer, frankly, I could see myself having taken similar action.”