A Number of Reasons I – the Chagos Deal

There are a number of reasons why the Chagos deal – handing the islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory – over to Mauritius,  is a really, really bad idea:

• It would compromise the reputation of the UK in the world, causing foreign countries to believe that the UK is now internationally weak, and unable to stand up for its own interests, and the interests of its people overseas. In particular, it encourages Spain to believe that it can take Gibraltar, and Argentina to believe that it can take the Falkland Islands;
• It would reduce the effectiveness of the military base on Diego Garcia because it permits foreign powers, with Mauritian approval, to construct their own military bases, including for surveillance and other purposes, on other islands in the archipelago;
• It would reduce the effectiveness of the military base because it would render it unlawful to service military assets with nuclear capability (both UK and USA) from using it;
• It would be a flagrant breach of the UK’s treaty 8737 with the United States, by which the UK promised that the UK would retain sovereignty over the islands;[1]
• It is extraordinary unkind to the Chagossian people, who Mauritius has always treated badly, who were not consulted, and who are more or less universally opposed the deal;
• It would cost the UK taxpayer a huge amount of money – over £30 billion.
• It would lead to the destruction of the Marine Protection Area, which is the largest marine protection area in the world;
• It is a deal made with crooks (both the current Prime Minister of Mauritius, and the previous Prime Minister of Mauritius have been arrested for money laundering and fraud).[2] The overwhelming likelihood is that if the deal proceeds, a considerable portion of the money paid will be syphoned off by these crooks.
• The case for handing over the Chagos islands to Mauritius has always been nonsensical. The Chagos islands have never been part of Mauritius (although it is true that for convenience they were for a while administered from the UK’s Foreign Office there);
• As part of the process whereby Mauritius gained independence in the 1960s, a deal was made between the UK and Mauritius whereby Mauritius was paid £3 million (£8 billion or so in today’s money) to renounce any possible claim to the islands. The then Prime Minister of Mauritius repeatedly said that Mauritius was not interested in the Chagos Islands. It would set a very bad precedent for the UK to permit breach of treaties made in the past;
• The court of the United Nations – the ICJ – had no jurisdiction in 2019 to rule on any question of sovereignty as between the UK and Mauritius[3], and the ruling was merely advisory in any event.[4] The ruling was not based on any sound legal principle, but rather was motivated by political antagonism towards the UK;
• The deal was steered through by an Indian gentleman working for the Foreign Office, Vijay Rangarajan. The population of Mauritius is predominantly ethnically Indian. It is prejudicial to public trust for a deal of this magnitude to be in the hands of someone with the same ethnicity as the beneficiary.
• Mauritius’s counsel is Philippe Sands KC, a close personal friend of the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer. That raises a reasonable apprehension of bias. It is material that when Mauritius’ Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam was caught carrying a suitcase of cash into a London bank in 2014[5], he said that he was in London to “discuss a legal matter with Mr Sands”.[6]

Is there any upside to the deal? Well, for politicians in Mauritius, obviously. And also, for Mr Sands, for whom the implementation of the deal would be a feather in his cap. Notwithstanding that Mr Sands swore the oath of allegiance when he took silk, he evidently takes considerable pleasure from the very opposite.[7]

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[1] See https://phenell.wordpress.com/2026/01/24/giving-away-the-chagos-is-illegal/

[2] The previous Prime Minister is out on bail. Charges against the present Prime Minister were dropped due to the prosecution’s delay in lodging the case.

[3] This is because Mauritius was, and indeed is, a member of the British Commonwealth, and the ICJ has no jurisdiction to resolve disputes between members of the British Commonwealth.

[4] It is usually ignored; see the analysis Provisional, but Not (Always) Pointless: Compliance with ICJ Provisional Measures.  There is these days precious little compliance with the court’s recent rulings:

Case	Year of Order(s)	Substantive compliance	Procedural compliance
Allegations of Genocide (Ukraine v. Russia)	2022	No	–
Application of the CERD (Azerbaijan v. Armenia)	2021	Partial	–
Application of the CERD (Armenia v. Azerbaijan)	2021-23	No	–
Application of the Genocide Convention (Gambia v. Myanmar)	2020	No	Yes
Treaty of Amity (Iran v. United States)	2018	No	–

See also https://phenell.wordpress.com/2024/10/09/hey-joe-more-on-the-chagos-islands/

[5] According to Le Mauricien, the bank greeted him with the words, “How are you Mr Banker?

[6] “Le Premier Ministre à Londres: Navin Ramgoolam, un citoyen comme un autre”. Le Mauricien. 13 April 2014.

[7] He has said it is a “fantastic thing… when you’ve taken your own country to court, won, and humiliated them completely”

Call Vijay Rangarajan

I did not ordinarily fire off letters to politicians suggesting to them directly how they should do their job, but I have this morning sent an e-mail to Lord De Mauley, who is the chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on International Relations and Defence, there any good reason why should not summon Vijay Rangarajan, the FCO’s lead negotiator in Chagos, to ask him:

• Did Rangarajan warn the government that ceding sovereignty of the Chagos would be in breach of Article 1 of the Treaty 8737, and hence illegal as a matter of international law?
• If so, when?
• If not, why not?

Other questions might follow.

As you might guess from his name, Mr Rangarajan was born in India, and is ethnically Indian. As are the great majority of the citizens of Mauritius. And unlike the Chagossians, who are ethnically Africans. It is something of a mystery why, in the circumstances, it was thought to be a good idea to put him in charge of negotiations with Mauritius to hand over to Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos islands, together with many billions of pounds? It is all the more unsatisfactory that Mauritius’s lawyer was Philippe Sands KC, a close friend of Keir Starmer. Nor do we derive much comfort from the fact that the Prime Minister of Mauritius, Navin Ramgoolam, is clearly a crook. His Wikipedia entry includes this:

Pool ions?

DCIM\100MEDIA\DJI_0049.JPG

Can someone with a bit of knowledge of chemistry help me with this, which is a matter of curiosity.

I have a salt water swimming pool. I put bags of salt into the water. The salt is sodium chloride. The chlorinator turns the chloride into chlorine, which keeps the water clean. So far so good. But what happens to the sodium? I asked Copilot, who told me that the sodium ions just “hang around”.

I am not satisfied with that answer. Ions do not just “hang around”. They react with something. Furthermore, I have to put bags and bags of salt into the pool every season. Big bags. That is quite a lot of chlorine, which is fine. It is also quite a lot of sodium.

Giving Away the Chagos is Illegal

People who follow these pages will know, if they pay attention (?!), that I think the notion of international law is very largely a chimera. Most of what emerges from the United Nations is not law at all, in the proper sense of that word, but the unenforceable expression of some political or governmental aspiration.

An exception is to be found in agreements, either between governments or corporations, insofar as they are enforceable. They can properly be called “law”.

An agreement which I was unaware of until this morning is the treaty between The United Kingdom and the United States of America number 8737, which is registered at the United Nations. It is the original treaty of 30 December 1966 whereby the UK and the USA agreed to the use of Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands, as a joint base. Article 1 provides as follows:

The Territory[1] shall remain under United Kingdom sovereignty

The attempt by Keir Starmer, in conjunction with his friends Richard Hermer[2] and Philippe Sands[3], to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is mind-bogglingly daft for a number of reasons which I have already mentioned in these pages. It is also in flagrant breach of Article 1 of treaty 8737. That treaty has been adjusted a number of times, but never in this respect.

CoPilot at the Controls

I was minded this morning to write a blog about Kaprekar’s Constant, as it is called (I do not think it is really a constant at all). And I did. As usual, I composed the blog in Word before copying and pasting.

These days, Word appears with a little message at the top asking if I would like the assistance of Copilot. In a moment of curiosity, I tried it, telling Word that I was planning to write a post. Copilot came up with a complete post of total fluff.[1] Who would post that sort of stuff, I wonder? Well me, you might say, if you follow the footnote above. But really?

But what if I was a vicar? I am not. But supposing I were, and wanted a quick sermon. Sure enough, CoPilot comes up with a complete sermon.[2] It was not, I thought, much more vacuous than the sort of sermon that real people come up with. If they are vicars.

6174 is the Number of Social Democracy?

I’ve been looking at something identified out by an Indian mathematician called Kaprekar. What he did was to devise a little routine. You take pretty much any 4 digit number, then you rearrange the four numbers from biggest to smallest. So for example 1234 would become 4321. Then you rearrange the numbers from smallest to biggest, and subtract the smaller one from the bigger one. Like this

4321

1234

3087

I say “pretty much” any number because obviously it does not work if all the four digits are the same. So leave those ones out.

It turns out that in about 4% of cases, you will come to 6174. Do it again, and it turns out that in about 10% of cases, you end up with 6174. By the time you’ve done it 7 times, it is 6174. Every time. It turns out that of all the numbers, 6174 is the only one which returns the same result as itself. In case you like this sort of thing, here is a graphical representation:

International Law? No. Not really.

Quite a few people have been blithely trumpeting that the arrest of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela is in breach of international law. Not many of them have any idea what they are talking about.

A solid starting point is that there is not, in truth, any such thing as international law. It is a chimera. Law is – to take a fairly typical definition – a system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties. And there is precious little of that that is international.

There are a few things that people sometimes call “international law”: mostly these are treaties. Countries can sign up to treaties if they want to. Insofar as these are enforceable at all, they are enforced by means of arbitration, and some of these arbitral panels call themselves courts, notwithstanding that they are not really courts at all. But their decisions are often enforceable as a matter of national law (in the UK, for example, via the Arbitration Act). You can call that “international law” if you like. But it is only real insofar a nation says so.

So here is the thing: it is all voluntary. Nations can and do decide whether they want to sign up to and ratify any particular international treaty. If not, then the content is not “law” in any sense for that nation.

So, let us look at the Rome Treaty, which has spawned the International Criminal Court. That body does indeed sometimes prosecute individuals for doing things most of us would regard as bad. Well, very bad, actually.