Judge who signed Chagos ruling calls for UK to pay £18 trillion in slavery reparations

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 deal that would cost the UK billions 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 hand over more than £18trillion.

At the time, he said the sum was an “underestimation” of the damage caused by Britain during the slave trade.

“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 £87.1 trillion, with the UK alone owing £18.8 trillion. That figure is equivalent to the UK’s entire gross domestic product (GDP) for 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.

That argument was accepted by the court, which ruled overwhelmingly that the islands should be transferred to Mauritius.

The Telegraph previously revealed that one of the judges who signed the ICJ ruling against the UK is a former member of the Chinese ministry of foreign affairs, who also sided with Russia on a separate ruling about the war in Ukraine.

Opponents of the process argue that the islands – which host a vital joint British-American military base – have never belonged to Mauritius.

Both Mauritius and the Chagos Islands (known in the UK as the British Indian Ocean Territory) were previously administered by the British Empire, but only Mauritius was given independence in 1968.

The islands were then cleared of native Chagossians to make way for the military base on the largest island, Diego Garcia. Many of the descendants of those displaced from the islands now live in the UK.

Britain has previously resisted attempts by Mauritius to take ownership of the islands through litigation in the international courts, arguing that any dispute over the territory was solely a matter for the two countries to settle.

But the involvement of the UN and the ICJ has raised concerns that the UK would be in breach of international law if the islands were retained, and that other international bodies could interfere with the operation of the base.

Downing Street said earlier this month that if the islands were not given away, at a cost of billions to the taxpayer, then “the electromagnetic spectrum at the Diego Garcia base would not be able to continue to operate”.

A government minister later appeared to contradict that statement, revealing in a written response to Parliament that the worst that could happen would be “arbitration” by a UN body, the International Telecommunication Union.

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “The ICJ court had judges appointed by Putin and Xi, and now we learn that one is pursuing vexatious reparations claims against the UK.

“The court’s judgment isn’t binding – if Starmer has a backbone he’d just ignore it. Each day we learn something new that somehow makes this deal even more ludicrous. This cowardly surrender by Starmer must end.”

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