Good morning. In October 2021, a boat carrying dozens of Tamils trying to find their way to Canada sprung a leak. They were rescued by the British navy and brought to Diego Garcia, a tropical island in the middle of the Indian Ocean that was under the control of the British government, and which hosted a US military base. But their saviours became their captors – and they found themselves in rat-infested camps, largely deprived of their liberty and caught in legal limbo with no obvious way out.
The authorities on Diego Garcia maintained that the asylum seekers were free to leave whenever they wanted, and that any restrictions on their movements there were lawful and necessary. Yesterday, a judge said that case had “not come close” to being made. She ruled that the asylum seekers had been unlawfully detained in conditions that one of them described as “hell on earth”. The ruling amounts to a crushing defeat for the British government, and a wholesale vindication for an almost forgotten group of people whose fate has been subjugated to geopolitical forces far beyond their control.
