Request from LALIT for International Committee of the Red Cross to be invited to visit Diego Garcia prisoners
03.09.2024
To: Prime Minister, Hon. Pravind Jugnauth.
2 September 2024.
Dear Sir,
Please would you consider the following formal request from LALIT.
Given that your Government is at the helm of the Republic of Mauritius, the sovereign State that has been found by the International Court of Justice and the UN General Assembly to have sovereignty over Chagos including Diego Garcia, could you please consider the plight of the refugees sequestrated on Diego Garcia.
In particular, today we request you to take an urgent decision to approach the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) so as to request, in turn, that the ICRC visit the 64 Sri Lankan refugees sequestrated at present on Diego Garcia.
Some of those sequestrated are children. The children, like the adults, have spent nearly three years under this illegal imprisonment and torture. Their conditions are believed to be very bad, even described as “dangerous”.
Only Mauritian police and other institutions have the legal authority to imprison people on our territory. Without this legal authority, the imprisonment amounts to sequestration and hostage-taking. Our territory is defined in the Constitution to include Chagos, which in turn includes Diego Garcia. This power that Mauritian police have to arrest people is, itself, in turn subject to the provisions of the Constitution of Mauritius.
The BIOT do not have this power over our territory. Nor do the US armed forces.
This letter is a follow-up letter, after a previous one to your Foreign Minister, Hon Maneesh Gobin, calling for the Supreme Court to take action, and visit Chagos including Diego Garcia, to hear the case of the refugees sequestrated illegally there, on Mauritian territory. We maintain this request for the Supreme Court to go and open a formal judicial hearing on Diego Garcia. We have, meanwhile, been informed by one of our members of the existence of written proof in the personal archives of former Chief Justice Rajsoomer Lallah of his visit as Magistrate to Diego Garcia – the last time that the judiciary sat for hearings on Chagos. (We note that the British judiciary is again trying to set up a hearing, with a new date set for 16 September.)
We should also put on record that on 20 June 2022, LALIT wrote to Foreign Minister at the time, Hon. Alan Ganoo, calling on him to invite the ICRC to visit these very Sri Lankan prisoners, when they were first sequestrated this way. At that time, there was not the same amount of damning evidence of outright ill-treatment, nor was it to be predicted that the UK-USA would prolong this illicit sequestration for years and years like this. But, had the Mauritian government acted at that time, perhaps we would not find ourselves where we are today, with children being exposed to such terrible treatment on our land.
We also draw your attention to our attempts 20 years ago, in the year 2004, to get Mauritian Authorities at the time to contact the ICRC to visit those suffering horrendous “rendering” and the torture of these illicit prisoners on Diego Garcia at the time. The head of the ICRC for the region in 2004 had assured us that the ICRC would undertake such a visit if the Mauritian government put in a request – that was at a time well prior to the ICJ judgment and the UN General Assembly almost unanimous resolution that together statute full Mauritian sovereignty, and the ICRC had then assured us at LALIT that they would do such an inspection if the Mauritian Government requested it. Had the then Mauritian Government acted as we proposed and as the ICRC agreed to expose, this action taken at that time might well have changed the course of history so as to prevent these kinds of illegal actions being perpetrated on our territory.
At the moment, there are new colonialist lobbies (see Telegraph 1 September article at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2024/09/01/chagos-islands-are-rightly-british/) already sabotaging any attempt by Messrs. Keir Starmer and David Lammy to so much as negotiate with Mauritius. We call once again on you to make a public statement demanding the unconditional withdrawal of the UK-USA from Chagos, including Diego Garcia, thus rescinding your offer of a lease for the USA’s military base, which represents a danger to world peace, and prevents the de-colonization of Africa’s last colony i.e. the decolonization of the Republic of Mauritius. Empires like the UK and USA respect only this kind of position that we are proposing you take. Anything less ethical and more supple, they simply dishonour.
Sovereignty is not something that is negotiable.
Yours sincerely,
Lindsey Collen and Cindy Clelie
For LALIT,
Copy: Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Press.
