Amal Clooney and the Chagos islanders

“My wife’s the smart one,” says George Clooney without a trace of irony. Before her marriage last year in a star-studded ceremony in Venice to the Hollywood heartthrob, Amal Alamuddin was well known in international legal circles for her human rights work.

But now Amal Clooney has become a global celebrity through what marketers call the “halo” effect emanating from her spouse. For example, Ms Clooney was acclaimed as London’s leading woman in the Evening Standard’s Power List 2014 easily beating UK Home Secretary, Theresa May, and fashion designer, Victoria Beckham. And there are endless articles focusing on her “glorious hair” and “most stylish looks” in accordance with her newly crowned “style star” status.

Yesterday, however, found Amal Clooney not on the red carpet of a film premiere but working alongside fellow barrister Edward Fitzgerald QC in the Supreme Court to ask a panel of five judges, led by president Lord Neuberger, to set aside the 2008 House of Lords’ ruling upholding the order in council (issued under the royal prerogative) banning the Chagos Islanders returning to their homeland in the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

This is the latest episode in a marathon legal challenge which has been running since 1998 when Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos Refugees Group, contacted solicitors Robin Mardemootoo in Mauritius and Richard Gifford in London. The Bancoult legal team, which included legendary South African-born barrister Sir Sydney Kentridge, went on to win a series of spectacular legal victories in the UK’s lower courts establishing the right of return of the 1750 or so islanders, who were forcibly removed from their homeland in the Chagos archipelago between 1968 and 1973 to make way for the US base on Diego Garcia. However, disappointment followed in 2008 when the UK government won a narrow victory in which the House of Lords, then the highest court in the land, split 3-2.

I attended some of the hearing in the House of Lords and was astonished by the number of lawyers in attendance from around the world – American, Australian, Canadian and South African. It was clear that the Chagos case has enormous implications, especially because of the singular importance of Magna Carta in international law. In particular, those powerful words in the 39th clause of the charter which are so often invoked by those fighting ethnic cleansing and other human rights abuses: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, or will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

However, it was left to South African-born Lord Hoffmann, one of the three judges who found for the UK, to deliver the bad news to Bancoult and his compatriots. “The right of abode is a creature of the law. The law gives it and the law may take it away,” he stated simply if controversially.

Nevertheless, on the day the verdict was announced I noted how many of those on the side of the Chagos exiles, especially many legal experts, took great comfort from the minority opinion offered by Lord Mance and Lord Bingham who found for the islanders. Bingham, widely regarded as the greatest judge of the modern era, took the view that former Labour foreign secretary, Robin Cook, had created an expectation after declaring that the UK would not appeal against the 2000 high court restoring the right of return. Later Cook set up a feasibility study to see if the Chagossians, the descendants of African slaves who had worked on the coconut plantations in the archipelago since the late 18th century, could live on some the other previously inhabited outer islands, such as Peros Banhos and Salomon. According to Bingham the Chagossians “were clearly intended to think, and did, that for the foreseeable future their right of return was assured.” He added: “The government could not lawfully resile from its representation without compelling reason, which was not shown.”

Lord Bingham died in 2010 but his influence lives on. “We knew something was wrong, somewhere,” explains Robin Mardemootoo. “You can’t win unanimously before the High Court, unanimously before the Court of Appeal, and then lose 3/2 with Lord Bingham ruling for us. That was not normal.”

Amal Clooney’s glorious hair and fashion sense predictably gained the attention of the UK tabloid press yesterday as she posed outside the court for a photograph with Bancoult and his supporters (“the London-based barrister … looked elegant in polka dots,” according to the Express) but in the court room itself the focus was very much on a key legal argument , namely that the draft report of Cook’s feasibility study, which found that resettlement was indeed possible, had been significantly changed after consultation with Foreign & Commonwealth officials to come down against a return by the time the final report was published in 2002.

The Supreme Court justices, which interestingly include Lord Mance, now have an opportunity to put right one of the worst human rights abuses carried out by the UK in the modern era.