Development is a human right.

So are clean air and water, and a stable climate.

No one is more engaged in advancing these ideas than McMaster University professor Bonny Ibhawoh.

For the past year, Ibhawoh and his colleagues have been formulating a policy document exploring the connections between sustainable development as a human right, and climate justice – bringing a justice dimension to discussions about how to mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown.

Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

Last November, Ibhawoh presented the document at the 30th Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention, in Belem, Brazil, COP-30. Ibhawoh teaches Global Human Rights in the Department of History, and the Centre for Global Peace, Justice and Health at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the founding Director of the McMaster Centre for Human Rights and Restorative Justice, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and current Chair of the United Nations’ Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development.

The GPM sat down with Bonny Ibhawoh in his McMaster University office. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here.

The Chagos Islands — not a place many people have heard of, much less visited. You can barely find them on a map, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Long before Europeans arrived, the Chagos Islands were culturally tied to the island of Mauritius, as it’s known today, 900 km east of Madagascar.

The Dutch occupied the island between 1638 and 1710. The French seized it in 1715, naming it Île de France. In 1810, the British seized it from the French, consolidating their colonial possession in the 1814 Treaty of Paris.

Mauritius, they called it — declaring it part of Britain’s far-flung “Indian Ocean Territory.”

At the height of the decolonization movement, in March 1968, Mauritius gained its independence – with one small cut-out: the Chagos islands, 2200 km northwest of Mauritius.

The Chagos Archipelago consists of a number of islands and atolls, the largest of which is Diego Garcia. Due south of the oil-rich Persian Gulf, about 27 square kilometers in size, Diego Garcia would be the perfect place to set up a military base, the British thought. In cahoots with their fast friends in Washington, that’s exactly what they did.

In late 1966, Diego Garcia became a shining star in the expanding constellation of US military bases all around the planet (now 800 in total). Also, a great ‘Black Site’ where official enemies could be detained and tortured in secret, without due process.

The Chagossians were forcibly displaced, in the cruelest of ways.

Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

Between 1967 and 1973, the Chagos Archipelago’s entire population was either blocked from returning or forcibly removed by the UK. The forcible expulsion of Diego Garcia’s population took place between July and September 1971. Britain declared the entire archipelago a “Marine Protected Area.”

In 2010, Mauritius undertook proceedings against the UK. They dragged on for years.

In 2017, the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice, the international community’s supreme judicial body, to render an Advisory Opinion on the matter. The ICJ issued its Advisory Opinion in February 2019:

The decolonization of Mauritius was not lawfully completed when that country acceded to independence, the Chagossian people’s inalienable right to self-determination has been violated, the UK’s administration of their island home is an internationally wrongful act, and the UK must end its administration of the archipelago “as rapidly as possible,” the ICJ declared.

The UN General Assembly endorsed the ICJ ruling shortly thereafter, calling on all UN member states to secure Chagossian independence by November 2025.

Colonialists to the core (and the tightest of US allies), Britain said sure, then hedged its bets.

In May 2025, the UK struck a deal with Mauritius. Under that deal — ostensibly aimed at implementing the ICJ ruling — Mauritius would lease Diego Garcia to the UK for 99 years, with a 40-year extension option.

This past December, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called on the UK to suspend that deal. In addition to denying the Chagossian people’s right to return to Diego Garcia Island, CERD said, the UK-Mauritius deals prevents Chagossians “from exercising their cultural rights and preserving their cultural heritage,” and perpetuates longstanding violations of the Chagossian people’s right to self-determination.

Under international law, the right to self-determination is jus cogens (obligatory;  no questions, no exceptions) and erga omnes (owed to all; all states are obliged to enforce it). 

A very long story that David Vine has been following for years.

David Vine is a Professor of Anthropology at American University, in Washington D.C. He’s the author of a trilogy of books about the US penchant for permanent war, and about America’s network of 800 military bases around the world. Island of Shame, the Secret History of the US Military Base on Diego Garcia, was published in 2011. All royalties go to the Chagossian people.

The latest of David Vine’s books, published in 2020 by University of California Press, is entitled The United States of War – a Global History of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State.

Listen to our conversation with David Vine. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Donate with a $15/monthly subscription

Watch our complete conversation with David Vine here: