Judge who ruled Britain should give up Chagos Islands says UK 'obliged' to pay £18 trillion in slavery reparations
26 February 2025, 14:06
An international judge who ruled that Britain should give up the Chagos Islands has also called on the UK to pay more than £18 trillion in slavery reparations.
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Patrick Robinson, a former International Court of Justice (ICJ) judge from Jamaica, ruled in 2019 that the UK should hand over the territory ‘as rapidly as possible’.
The 2019 ruling has since become one of the leading arguments in the case for Britain handing the islands to Mauritius.
Now, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has proposed a deal that would see the government give up the British Indian Ocean Territory.
However, it would pay to lease back the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia for 99 years in a move expected to cost up to £18 billion.
In the 2019 case, lawyers representing Mauritius and other nations argued Britain would be taking part in “decolonisation” by giving the islands away.
Read more: Chagossians beg to return to their homeland, as LBC visits their lunch club in Crawley
Mr Robinson, one of multiple judges who accepted the argument and signed the 2019 ruling, is also a leading voice demanding that Britain pays reparations for slavery, reports The Telegraph.
He co-authored a 2023 UN report alongside economists, historians and lawyers calling for African and Caribbean countries to be handed more than £18 trillion by Britain for historical crimes.
The lawyer said at the tune this was still an ‘underestimation’ of the pain Britain’s slave trade had caused.
Mr Robinson told the BBC at the time: “Once a state has committed a wrongful act, it’s obliged to pay reparations.”
The report argued 31 former slave-trading countries should fork out £87.1trillion, with Britain owing £18.8trillion. While Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal is recognition of Britain’s colonial past, critics say it is costly and could pose a national security threat.
Speaking to LBC, former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman said the "surrender of the Chagos Islands couldn't be a bigger disaster, frankly, for the US-UK relationship.
Donald Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed that the deal posed a threat to US security, raising the alarm over China's influence in the region.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy is expected to meet Trump's secretary of state, Marco Rubio, later this month in a bid to convince the US to back the deal.
He is also expected to address their concerns over China gaining a further foothold in the Indo-Pacific.
Mauritius has said that it would prevent a "third party" being given access to any other strategic islands.
