MJIL’s 2013 Talk Addresses Dispossessed

Dean R. P. Edwards
Volume 3, Issue 10, (Originally Published on Monday 13 May 2013)
 
A packed Room G08 last Tuesday heard
 
Dr Stewart Motha give a thought-provoking talk on ‘The Nomos of the Sea and People in Small Boats’.
 
The talk was hosted by the Melbourne Journal of International Law (MJIL) and by the Institute of International Law and the Humanities, and was chaired by Prof. Sundhya Pahuja.
 
Motha described the plight of the Chagos islanders, who were expelled from their homes on Diego Garcia in the 1960s. Though British subjects, they were relocated to nearby Mauritius, to make way for a strategic US air base on their former home in the Indian Ocean.
 
Motha drew comparisons from literature and philosophy, arguing that the Chagossians, like other ‘boat people’, have suffered at the hands of modern states’ concerns over sovereignty.
 
Dean R. P. Edwards