Chagos Refugees Group UK: British Citizenship for Chagossians in Forced Exile

On Thursday 17th April 2014 the Chagossian community will hold a demonstration in front of the Home Office in East Croydon about all Citizenship and visa problems. Below is some background to the problems.

(extracted from ‘Unusual Immigrants’, or, Chagos Islanders and Their Confrontations with British Citizenship by Laura Jeffery. Anthropology in Action, 18, 2, (2011)

The British Overseas Territories Act 2002 reclassified the British Dependent Territories (BDTs) as British Overseas Territories (BOTs) and awarded full U.K. citizenship to citizens of such territories. People born on Chagos when it was a British colony, who were eligible for BDT citizenship under the British Nationality Act 1981, thus became eligible for full U.K. citizenship through their place of birth. According to the British Overseas Territories Act 2002, citizens of the BOTs can transmit the entitlement to U.K. citizenship to their children who are also born in a BOT. This provision would not initially have applied to the children born to Chagos islanders in exile, since they were born not in a BOT but in the independent republics of Mauritius and Seychelles. In response to this situation, the Chagos Refugees Group staged a sleep-in protest outside the British High Commission in the Mauritian capital Port Louis. Their campaign was supported in the U.K. by the Labour MPs Tam Dalyell (who was then Father of the House) and Jeremy Corbyn, who repeatedly put the Chagossian case on the parliamentary agenda. They emphasized that the Chagos islanders’ residence outwith the Chagos Archipelago was a result of their forcible displacement from that territory rather than choice. Accepting this logic, the government introduced a supplementary section to provide for the transmission of U.K. citizenship to Chagos islanders’ second-generation descendants born in exile. From the perspective of Chagossians, however, there have been three main problems with the limitations on eligibility for U.K. citizenship laid out in the British Overseas Territories Act 2002 (and the corresponding British Nationality Act 1981).

1. Privileging Marriage

According to the British Nationality Act 1981, whereas an unmarried British woman can pass her citizenship to her children, an unmarried British man cannot pass his citizenship to his children born outwith marriage (unless the parents subsequently marry). The problem for the extended Chagossian community is that – in common with other matrifocal post-slavery societies in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean – the colonial Chagos Archipelago was characterized by female-headed households, a relative instability of sexual relationships and a low incidence of marriage (Botte 1980: 22–23; Walker 1986: 15–18). Although most of its inhabitants were nominally Roman Catholic, the Chagos Archipelago did not have a permanent Catholic priest during its period of colonial settlement from 1795 to 1973. An itinerant priest travelled around the Mauritius outer islands to perform important ceremonies such as baptisms, christenings and weddings; in between these visits, administrators apparently conducted weekly services (Dussercle 1934: 10; Dussercle 1935; Descroizilles and Mülnier 1999: 26). Chagos islanders told me that they did not necessarily get married to their partners, both because they were not encouraged to do so and because it was not expected that the union would be for life. Thus many Chagossians felt that the privileging of ‘legitimate’ children in U.K. citizenship legislation discriminated against those for whom marriage was not promoted by the British authorities. In particular, this rule affects the children born in exile to an unmarried Chagossian man and a non-Chagossian woman, who comprise a relatively common category as a result of the flows of people amongst all of the dependencies of colonial Mauritius.

2. Date of Forced Deportation

The supplementary section of the British Overseas Territories Act 2002 covers Chagossians’ second- generation descendants only if they were born in exile after 26 April 1969. In 2001, Blair’s Labour government selected this cut-off date as the start of what Ben Bradshaw (then a junior Foreign Office Minister) called the 1960s Wilson government’s ‘policy of exclusion’ from the Chagos Archipelago. Writing this start date into the 2002 legislation was a way to avoid awarding U.K. citizenship to the children of those islanders deemed by government officials to have left Chagos ‘voluntarily’ prior to the forced depopulation of the territory. This start date gives rise to several problems. Firstly, since there were limited medical facilities on Chagos, it was not uncommon in the early and mid-twentieth century for expectant mothers to give birth in Mauritius before returning to Chagos, so place of birth is not a reliable indicator of residence since the children of Chagos residents could be born in Mauritius. Secondly, Chagossians and their supporters contest the claimed date for the start of the forced deportations: regardless of when the forced deportations actually began, the BIOT was established in 1965, and islanders visiting Mauritius or Seychelles had been prevented from returning to Chagos from the mid-1960s onwards. As a result of these anomalies, there are numerous Chagossian families in which those siblings born in exile prior to 1969 remained ineligible for U.K. citizenship whilst those born in exile after 1969 became eligible for U.K. citizenship. In its briefing for a House of Lords Committee debate on the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill in 2009, the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association (ILPA) recommended removing this cut-off date to ‘ensure that Chagos Islanders ... born in exile before 26 April 1969 are British Citizens’.

3. Subsequent Generations and Spouses

Whilst the legislation provides for native Chagos islanders and their second-generation descendants born in exile, it does not include subsequent generations of descendants or non-Chagossian spouses. Ben Bradshaw told the standing committee concerned with the British Overseas Territories Bill that the government’s rationale was that extending eligibility to subsequent generations would privilege Chagos islanders vis-à-vis other BOT citizens by descent, who could not pass their citizenship to future generations born outwith BOTs. In any case, he added tantalizingly, transmission of U.K. citizenship to subsequent generations would become unnecessary in the event of resettlement of Chagos as a BOT, since subsequent generations born in or resident on Chagos would become eligible in their own right. From the perspective of Chagossians themselves, however, the issue is that since the depopulation of Chagos took place from 1965 to 1973, a whole generation born in exile has had time to grow up and produce a subsequent generation of children, who are not eligible for U.K. citizenship. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee took evidence from the leaders of three Chagossian organizations in 2008, agreed that the fact that the islanders were no longer living in a BOT was ‘as a consequence of exile rather than their own choice’, and recommended that citizenship ‘should be extended to third generation descendants of exiled Chagossians’. Similarly, the ILPA noted that the fact that ‘the children of Chagossians are born outside the U.K. or a qualifying territory is no fault of their own but the result of their enforced exile’, and concluded that ‘few can have as compelling a claim to British citizenship as those children’. In relation to spouses, the majority of Chagossians who have married since arriving in Mauritius or Seychelles have married non-Chagossian partners, who likewise are not automatically eligible for U.K. citizenship.

Dr Laura Jeffery is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has worked with the Chagossian community since 2002, and is author of the book Chagos Islanders in Mauritius and the UK: Forced Displace- ment and Onward Migration (MUP 2011). She currently holds an ESRC Research Fellowship to explore debates about environmental knowledge in the context of the Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA) designated by the U.K. Government in 2010, which is being challenged by the Mauritian Government under the United Nations Conven- tion on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Email: Laura.Jeffery@ed.ac.uk

Chagos Refugees Group UK

Wednesday 16 April 2014

British Citizenship for Chagossians in Forced Exile

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