This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Misley Mandarin was expelled from the Chagos Islands as a child by Harold Wilson’s government. Many decades later, having proclaimed himself chief minister of the British Indian Ocean Territory in order to oppose the so-called decolonisation of his homeland, he landed on one of the outer Chagos islands in February.
Had he gone with Philippe Sands, who did something similar with a group of pro-Mauritius Chagossians in 2022, he would have been unmolested. But he did not have the money to retain Sir Keir Starmer’s friend as his barrister so the British government sought to expel him from the islands for the second time.
Fortunately, James Lewis KC, Chief Justice of the BIOT, granted an injunction against his removal pending a full judicial review. Lewis CJ, who apparently made the order whilst on a flight to Africa, is also the chief justice of the Falkland Islands, a supreme court judge of the Supreme Court of the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, and of the British Antarctic Territory, and joint head of chambers of Three Raymond Buildings. In England he is a recorder and deputy high court judge. All these are part-time jobs.
At least we know who the incumbent chief justice is. When a group of Chagossians tried to visit their homeland in the 1990s, they were barred by the commissioner under the islands’ immigration ordinance. That particular piece of BIOT legislation had been published in the BIOT Gazette, which had a run of a few copies.
Seeking to sue the island’s government, they had to try to force the Foreign and Commonwealth Office into establishing the BIOT Supreme Court. Eventually, they were told to file their papers to the sub-registry of the Court whose address was “The Glebe Cottage, Woolfardisworthy East, Nr Crediton” (the registry was probably in Diego Garcia, although no one seemed to know who was the registrar).
What the plaintiffs apparently did not realise was that the BIOT Supreme Court did exist, its chief justice being Sir John Fieldsend, formerly of the High Court of Southern Rhodesia, who had resigned from the latter after Rhodesia declared independence in 1965 and later became the first chief justice of Zimbabwe. As far as I know, the only way anyone would have known of his appointment would be from the International Who’s Who.
The majority of Pitcairn’s adult men were discovered to be paedophiles
At least the BIOT Supreme Court had judges. When the majority of Pitcairn’s adult men were discovered to be paedophiles, the territory’s supreme court, which had existed only on paper, had to be hastily set up with New Zealand judges; and when the defendants appealed their convictions (one of the grounds being that they were not given enough notice of the fact that rape was illegal in Pitcairn) a court of appeal also had to be created, even though it had existed in constitutional theory.
The cases eventually wound up to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, where one of the questions was for how long certain pieces of legislation had been nailed on a board and whether anyone had access to a set of Halsbury’s Laws of England which the British authorities had sent to the islands, where no one had more than a secondary school education.
But Lord Hoffmann cut short these fascinating legal arguments (is ignorance of the law a defence when you literally had no copies of the law?) and found that rape was in fact illegal in the South Pacific.
At least Pitcairn Island had courts. In the early 1980s, the British Army in Berlin established a shooting range in a residential area. The neighbours tried to sue for nuisance in the Berlin administrative court, but the court lacked jurisdiction because it could only hear cases involving the occupation forces with permission of the relevant allied military commander.
Then they tried to sue in the British sector’s high court, whose existence had been provided for by the Berlin military government. To their amazement, they then discovered that the court did not exist, because the British military government simply did not bother to establish any court (there was a US court for Berlin, which heard one case; the judge was fired when some German plaintiffs tried to bring a second case).
The farce ended in the High Court in England, where the Crown pleaded that the “Ministry of Defence” was not a body corporate and therefore could not be sued since its existence was unknown to the general law.
Then it argued, this time with success, that Major-General Bernard Gordon Lennox, the British Army commander in Berlin, was part of a foreign government and could not be sued as he possessed sovereign immunity.
The foreign government in question was presumably the British Army in Berlin, and by this analogy Gordon Lennox was the British Army’s first military dictator since Oliver Cromwell.
