The price of Brown’s green legacy

In January 2009, shortly before the end of his Presidency, George W Bush announced the creation of a Marine Protected Area around its overseas territories in the Pacific Ocean. It was widely speculated in the news media at the time that this was an attempt to create a positive legacy for a deeply unpopular leader.

Roll on 2010, and Gordon Brown is preparing to say goodbye to Number 10 Downing Street. At the beginning of this month, the Government announced the creation of a Marine Protected Area around the Chagos Islands – the UK’s overseas territories in the Indian Ocean.

I have documented before the British Government’s attempts to prevent the former inhabitants of the Chagos Islanders returning home, having been exiled in the 1960s to make way for a US military base on Diego Garcia. The creation of the Marine Protected Area (MPA) means that no fishing will be allowed in the waters around the islands, thereby removing the only viable means the Chagossians would have of making a living should they return to the islands. The Foreign Office insists that this does not prejudice the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, expected later this year, on whether or not the Chagossians should be allowed to return. An unusually flustered Chris Bryant, Minister for Europe, tried to defend the Government’s decision in the House of Commons, acknowledging no contradiction in this position. He said, “The extension of the marine protected area and the new measures we are taking will not have any direct or indirect effect on the rights or otherwise of Chagossians to return to the islands. These are two entirely separate issues.”

In itself, the MPA is a good idea, which will help to protect a precious marine ecosystem. But it could have been created, as many Parliamentarians requested, with a condition to allow limited fishing in certain areas, to support the Chagossians should they win their battle to return. Bizarrely, the MPA will include – much as Bush’s does – for an exclusion zone to allow for continued military activity in the area. Somehow, the Foreign Office believes that while small-scale fishing to support a small community on the outer islands will cause unacceptable damage to the environment, a large military base on Diego Garcia is perfectly acceptable.

More recently still, the Government’s current justification for preventing the Chagossians’ return – that its resettlement feasibility study showed the islands could not support repopulation – has been seriously called into question. One of the consultants commissioned by the Foreign Office to produce the study has revealed that his conclusion that the resettlement was a viable option was silenced by his client.

Just as the Government has evaded democratic scrutiny at every turn in this sorry saga, the announcement of the MPA was made while Parliament was in recess. Foreign Office Minister Ivan Lewis, who promised just weeks earlier during an excellent debate on the subject that MPs would be fully briefed before any final decision was made on the MPA, was nowhere to be seen.

One can hardly begrudge Gordon Brown for wanting to make protection of the planet and marine biodiversity a part of his legacy, but this needn’t be incompatible with human rights. Jeremy Corbyn MP, who has long campaigned for the rights of Chagossians, pointed out that “every other marine protected area proposed anywhere in the world by anybody includes a local human element to protect the zone” – a role which those Chagossians who do wish to return would be more than happy to fulfil. Diane Abbott MP (Labour) has said the Government “cannot hide behind environmentalism to mask what many of us fear is an encroachment on the rights and legitimate expectations of the Chagossian people”, while Mark Field MP (Conservative) accused the Government of “using the environmental issue as a fig leaf for the continued abuse of these human rights”.

I leave you with the words of human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who wrote:

"The truth is that no Chagossian has anything like equal rights with even the warty sea slug. There is no sense that the British government will let them go back. The government is not even contemplating equal rights for Chagossians and sea slugs."