Opinion: International law vs. the national interest
Why handover a piece of British territory when no court has forced us to, asks David Blair, a journalist and former civil servant, and Yuan Yi Zhu, an international lawyer
United Nations/Tessa ClarkeWhy has the current UK Government handed over a piece of British Overseas territory to another country?
A former civil servant and now Chief Foreign Correspondent of the Telegraph David Blair writing this weekend blames the current British diplomats’ worship of the “rules-based international system, meaning the assembly of laws and institutions created after 1945 to restrain the behaviour of states.”
The kowtowing to a “cabal” of human rights lawyers had led a British government to give up our Chagos Islands territory in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius this month.
Now is not the time to be so “purist” given the wars around the world and geopolitical threats from states ignoring international law, Blair argues. We have to think of our national interest.
In 2019 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made an advisory opinion that the Chagos Islands belonged to Mauritius. Then the United Nations General Assembly in New York passed a Resolution confirming this view.
These were not court cases. No legal ruling to abide by. Instead the opinions were the views of international judges and other nation states. Important to consider, granted. But, writes Blair, “Can the Foreign Secretary overrule them? Of course, but Foreign Secretaries come and go. Eventually there will be one who gives way and David Lammy is clearly that man.”
Meanwhile Yuan Yi Zhu, an international lawyer and Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange, suggests that the British government is wrong to say in the future “Mauritius will be able to obtain a binding decree from an international court forcing the UK to hand over the Chagos Islands, and with no obligation to guarantee the operation of the [Diego Garcia island] base.”
Why? “International law is built upon the principle of state consent: with vanishingly rare exceptions involving subjects such as genocide, no state is bound by any particular part of international law unless it agrees to be so bound.”
For more, click David Blair’s article here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/25/outdated-fco-dogma-makes-britain-weak-chagos-proves-it/
And Yan Yi Zhu here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/24/starmers-chagos-surrender-cannot-be-defended-on-legal/
Tessa Clarke/ 26 May 2025