Reading Philippe Sands and The Last Colony critically

Philippe Sands

MC-OPED 01: Philippe Sands, KC, is an international lawyer and the author of several acclaimed works on human rights (for which he received the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016) and law, as well as his recent work in legal storytelling. The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain's Colonial Legacy, Sands' 2022 book, is a story-based exploration of the Chagos Archipelago dispute, focusing on the forced removal of the "Chagossian" and Britain's colonising state in the Indian Ocean. The book, which has been praised for its powerfully written, and accessible (for the most part) recollection of international law, must also, however, be read with a certain degree of critical distance not least because of Sands' deep involvement with the Mauritian v. United Kingdom legal case before the ICJ, and ITLOS.

 
Sands was an advisor to Mauritius and was responsible for formulating and presenting the legal arguments that challenged British sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. His participation in court was instrumental in shaping the ICJ's 2019 advisory opinion and the subsequent ITLOS maritime delimitation case, which supported Mauritius' case. However, Sands' framing of the dispute - especially in The Last Colony - suggests legitimate concerns about a selective legal narrative, narrative bias, and an unexamined political intimacy with Mauritius' political elite. By casting the Chagos issue almost entirely in terms of Chagossian dispossession and British malfeasance, Sands overlooks or downplays the deeper regional history and the Maldivian historical claims to Chagos that were relinquished in 1965, as well as the colonial reorganisation of territorial governance that preceded Mauritian independence.

 
This critique argues that SaSands' dual function (as advocate and narrator) blurs the distinction between law and story, and how historical facts inform it. His influential book, however, may end up serving double duty - more as a political brief for Mauritius than a purely neutral analysis of decolonisation and justice. As such, it deserves a closer look not only for what it says, but also for what it strategically skips over.