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LIT-1593: “That’s When the Nightmare Started”: UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1365) in full, from Human Rights Watch's own PDF; worth reading as the documented account, from UK files quoted in English judgments and 43 Chagossian interviews, that UK officials planned the removal with the US and described the islands as having no permanent population, knowing otherwise, to avoid reporting to the UN, and as the case that the continuing bar on return is a continuing crime against humanity. Read it knowing that it is an advocacy report, that the archival quotations are at one remove, that its interviewees were reached through representative groups, that its continuing-crime theory has not been tested in an international court, and that the governments' replies in its annexes are page images not read here.
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Tagssociety-and-governance, ethics
ReportsCASE-169 — The Chagossians, 1965 to now: a people expelled from the Chagos Archipelago between 1967 and 1973 for the Diego Garcia base, dispersed to Mauritius, the Seychelles and Britain, whose practices, kinship and political organization continued or arose in exile while sovereignty over the islands was settled between states
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1365 — Human Rights Watch — That's When the Nightmare Started

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Human Rights Watch (2023). “That’s When the Nightmare Started”: UK and US Forced Displacement of the Chagossians and Ongoing Colonial Crimes. 15 February 2023.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1365), from Human Rights Watch’s PDF; the annexes, page images, were not read.

Why this is here

A2 of the exchange named it the best starting source for CASE-169, “because it combines archival records with interviews across the diaspora”, and A2–A3 rested the case’s account of the administrative classification of the islanders as a non-permanent population on it. The case holds that account as the exchange’s until this is read.

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