An international judge who ruled against the UK on the Chagos Islands has since also called for Britain to pay more than £18 trillion in reparations for slavery.
Patrick Robinson, a Jamaican judge who previously served on the International Court of Justice (ICJ), was one of the judges who ruled in 2019 that the UK should hand over the islands “as rapidly as possible”.
The ICJ’s ruling has since become one of the main arguments in favour of Britain giving away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in a multi-billion pound deal over 99 years.
The deal, which has been criticised by the Conservatives and some members of Donald Trump’s team, was pursued by Sir Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer, his Attorney General, after they took office last year.
Mr Robinson, one of the judges who signed the ruling, is also a leading advocate for Britain to pay slavery reparations to African and Caribbean countries and co-authored a UN report in 2023 that called for the UK to give away more than £18trillion.
At the time, he said the sum was an “underestimation” of the damage caused by Britain during the slave trade, backing calls for historical reparations.
“Once a state has committed a wrongful act, it’s obliged to pay reparations,” he told the BBC.
‘Depraved experiment’
The report saw Mr Robinson bring together economists, historians and lawyers in an attempt to put a figure on the reparations owed by Western countries for historical crimes.
It argued that 31 former slaveholding countries should pay £87.1trillion, with the UK alone owing £18.8trillion. That figure is equivalent to the UK’s entire gross domestic product (GDP) in more than seven years.
Announcing the report in a speech at the London Mayor’s office, Mr Robinson said that reparations by the UK were “necessary for the completion of emancipation”.
Speaking at the same event, Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, said that “there should be no doubt or denial of the scale of Britain’s involvement in this depraved experiment”.
Lawyers representing Mauritius and other countries in the ICJ case on the Chagos Islands argued that Britain would be taking part in “decolonisation” by giving them away.