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Who gets to speak? : international lawyering and chagossian voices in the last colony
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Temple international and comparative law journal, 2024, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 117-127
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VON MASSOW, Sebastian, Who gets to speak? : international lawyering and chagossian voices in the last colony, Temple international and comparative law journal, 2024, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 117-127 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92859
Abstract
With The Last Colony, Philippe Sands has given us a powerful account of the speakable but long-silenced injustice of the Chagos, bringing it to the attention of a wide readership, lending force to a long overdue collective reckoning with Britain’s colonial legacies, and mounting an energetic defence of the efficacy of international law and its tribunals. However, in doing so, Sands has smoothed the edges of an uncomfortably jagged piece of the puzzle—the place of the Chagossians. The place of the Chagossians within the litigation raises a fundamental and difficult question for these cases and by extension for The Last Colony. In its simplest form, it boils down to this: Who gets to speak? This question can take various guises. In procedural terms: Is the Mauritian legal team the legitimate legal representative of the Chagossians? Or in doctrinal terms: Do the Chagossians have a distinct right to self-determination, and if so, what is the relationship between this and the Mauritians’ right as litigated at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)? Put in broader postcolonial terms: Can a British lawyer meaningfully speak for the Chagossians, or are they being made to “wear the livery that the white man has sewed for [them]” by having their grievances articulated by Western lawyers in the language of international law? Whilst the emphasis may shift, each formulation requires us to engage with the specific grievance suffered by the Chagossians, the form this grievance takes once articulated by international lawyers, and what this articulation can tell us about the relationship between international lawyering and colonialism.