Chagos Islands, Ukraine and international law with Philippe Sands

The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

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4.1 • 102 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Philippe Sands KC joins Professor Catherine Barnard to discuss his latest book, 'The Last Colony', which tells the story of the illegal British occupation of the Chagos Islands; the UK's role in the world; as well as Russia's war against Ukraine, from the perspective of international law. ---- Philippe Sands KC is Professor of the Public Understanding of Law at University College London Faculty of Laws and Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a practising barrister at 11 King’s Bench Walk (11KBW) and appears as counsel before the International Court of Justice and other international courts and tribunals. He sits as an arbitrator in international investment disputes and the Court of Arbitration for Sport. He is author of 'Lawless World' (2005) and 'Torture Team'(2008) and numerous academic books on international law, and has contributed to the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times, The Guardian and the New York Times. His most recent books are 'East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide' (2016) (awarded the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, the 2017 British Book Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the 2018 Prix Montaigne) and 'The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive' (2020), also available as BBC and France Culture podcasts. His latest book is 'The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy' (2022). Philippe is President of English PEN and a member of the Board of the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to UKis Itel, the newly rebranded podcast from the UK and a changing Europe.
0:05.2	Every month we'll be getting together with a guest who's an expert in their field to talk through some of the key issues of our time.
0:11.3	So whether you're into constitutional law or politics or international relations, subscribe and listen in,
0:16.5	because this is the place you'll figure out what's really going on.
0:38.6	So I'm delighted to be joined today by the esteemed international lawyer and author, Philippe Sands. Philippe is a professor of law at UCL, the QC at Matrix Chamber,
0:43.3	and the author of many books, including the best-selling East West Street and the Ratline.
0:51.3	His recent work, The Last Colony,
0:53.3	examines Britain's post-war colonial legacy through the story of the Chegos archipelago,
0:58.8	and the landmark case that went to the International Court of Justice in the Hague in 2018.
1:04.0	Philippe, welcome and thank you very much for your time.
1:08.0	Shall we start with Chegos? First of all, can you just tell us where is it?
1:12.6	And secondly, why is it so important?
1:15.6	Sure, well just to kick off how really lovely it is to be on this podcast, I have listened to it and I'm really thrilled to be having this conversation.
1:22.6	So the Chegos Archipelago is a group of about 58 tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
1:31.8	It has always been territorially treated as part of Mauritius, which was a French colony until 1814,
1:38.8	and then became a British colony until 1968 when Mauritius attained independence. But three years before
1:47.8	Mauritius attained independence, the United Kingdom decided it, the government of Harold Wilson,
1:52.4	decided that it would accede to a request to give one of the islands, Diego Garcia, on a lease
1:58.1	basis, to the United States as a military base. And in order to achieve that,
2:03.1	it did two things. Firstly, it separated Chagos from the rest of Mauritius and created a new colony,
2:12.2	the British Indian Ocean Territory. It will be seen as the last colony of the United Kingdom ever
2:16.5	created. And it's the last colony in the United Kingdom ever created, and it's the
	...

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