Professor Sands takes us from the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland and the Nuremberg Trials to the Chagos Islands and judgment against the UK at the International Court of Justice (I.J.C.) in 2019 – the last British colony in Africa.
This story is part of the succession of Human Rights problems facing the world today – the invasion of land borders, the use of national borders by authoritarian regimes, the plight of asylum seekers and refugees.
Defying the I.C.J advisory opinion, and the U.N.General Assembly, the Chagos Islands case goes before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea to which the British Government is a party. Professor Sands represents the Mauritian Government in this case. In a New York Times article he writes, ‘Britain’s brazen double standard [as] grotesque and damaging …..It undermines the Biden and UK Governments principles invoked to Beijing over China’s claims in the South China Sea’.
