This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Until 1920, king’s counsels needed to obtain a special licence if they wished to appear against the Crown. Silks were, after all, His Majesty’s counsels learned in the law, and upon their appointment had to promise to “take no wages or fee of any man” against the sovereign, an undertaking that law officers make to this day.
Nothing could be further from the thoughts of Philippe Sands KC, who last year gleefully told a Cambridge audience, “It’s a really fantastic thing about Britain that I think it’s probably the only country in the world where when you’ve been to an international court against your own country, won and humiliated them completely, they still celebrate you and that is special.”
Mr Sands, as some readers will recall, was until last December the Republic of Mauritius’s chief legal adviser (and publicist) in its lawfare campaign against the United Kingdom’s ownership of the Chagos Islands.
Under the terms of the deal, Mauritius will lease Diego Garcia to the United Kingdom for the modest sum of £101m a year, plus development monies for Mauritius. Such is the windfall for Mauritius that 81 per cent of its workforce will no longer have to pay any income tax.
There is a lot of truth in Mr Sands’s words. It is, for instance, difficult to imagine that he would be feted in Mauritius (which gave him citizenship by special ministerial decree a few years ago, ostensibly so that he could dodge Covid restrictions in Germany, though he was happy enough to keep it afterwards) had he acted against that country.
Certainly, Mauritius would not have conferred on him its highest national honour, carrying with it the title of “The Honourable”.
In fact, under a 2021 Mauritian law banning “misrepresenting the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory”, The Honourable Mr Sands would potentially face a decade in a Mauritian prison had he represented Britain against Mauritius, or written on behalf of the UK government in support of British sovereignty over the Chagos.
As he admitted to the British parliament, Mr Sands was involved in the drafting of the 2021 law, something he did not think was incompatible with his involvement in English PEN.
In addition to his busy career acting in the service of his new country, The Honourable Mr Sands has also maintained a flourishing writing career. His 2022 book on the Chagos affair, The Last Colony, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and received rave reviews, consolidating his public image as a champion of the Chagossians’ cause.
The Chagossians themselves, most of whom live in great poverty in Crawley (because they landed at Gatwick Airport and Crawley was next door), are less complimentary about their white saviour. Having been treated like third-class citizens in Mauritius, a country five days away by sail from their homeland and where they face widespread racial discrimination, they have little love for the place.
In fact, as Mauritius and the Honourable Mr Sands have been busily celebrating the “decolonisation” of the Chagos Islands, so many Chagossians have chosen to flee Mauritius and to come to the UK that Crawley Borough Council declared a housing emergency.
Under Sands’s framing, Chagossians have no right to be at the negotiating table
Yet, under the legal theory Sands has propagated in international courts, the views of Chagossians do not matter at all.
This is because Sands’ legal strategy has been to frame the 1965 detachment of the Chagos from the Colony of Mauritius — freely consented to by Mauritius’s prime minister in return for cash — as a dispute over the decolonisation of Mauritius.
Under this legal framing, Chagossians have no right to be at the negotiating table and no independent legal standing. Their right to have a say over the future of the Chagos, insofar they have any, are as citizens of Mauritius.
Indeed, the British government did not even bother telling the Chagossians that a deal had been reached until the morning of the announcement, so great is the Foreign Office’s contempt for the community.
Tough luck, effectively says the Honourable Mr Sands; this is what international law says. Several Chagossians in Crawley have told me that he is less than keen to discuss the matter with them, much less meet Chagossians there face-to-face.
One can hardly blame him: his natural public speaking milieu are the courthouses of The Hague and literary festivals in southern England, not the sort of place many Chagossians can afford to go to.
Many lawyers go into the profession because they want to advance the sacred cause of justice. Many lawyers go into the profession because they want to make a living. To most lawyers, it is probably a bit of both.
But it takes a special degree of cynicism to exploit the plight of some of the least powerful and most destitute people in Britain to enrich a banana republic in its neo-colonialist project and to present oneself as the moral hero in the process.
