British historical and international legal responsibility for colonial and post-colonial crimes

General information. Britain was once a major colonial power, whose expansion relied on exploiting the natural resources of the lands under its control, exporting their cultural assets and the slave trade. The political and economic dynamism of the empire demanded a strong moral framing which gave rise to a hypocritical ideology that fused cynical prosperity "on the bones" of oppressed peoples with enlightened messianism, the heavy burden of the "white man," supposedly the source of progress for the rest of the world. In this fusion, colonialism became, and still is to some extent, a factor of national pride, combining a sense of one’s own racial and ethnic exceptionalism with a condescending attitude towards others. It is this understanding that gives rise to the view of many Britons without migrant roots that the demands that they repent for the sins of the colonial past, particularly from India and Pakistan, are untenable, since those countries enjoyed the benefits of civilisation, democracy and free trade under the tutelage of the empire.

The above, as well as the degree of influence of the colonial elites within the country, is eloquently illustrated by the fact that following the abolition of slavery in metropolitan Britain in 1833, the then government decided to pay £20 million to former slave owners and slave traders as compensation for loss of income from slave labour. This amount was 40 percent of the annual budget at the time, and the authorities only managed to pay off the descendants of the "damaged" slave-owners in 2015. By the way, 47,000 people received these payments.

The UK lost its status as a world power at the end of the Second World War, after which it was unable to quench the wave of national liberation movements that rose in the territories it controlled, leading to the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and the ensuing parade of sovereignties in 1960. Anticipating that the former possessions, with UN support, would rush to build their statehood, the metropole managed to buck the trend by gradually transforming the empire into a Commonwealth of Nations.

The process of decolonisation was accompanied by a radical reformatting of established notions of law and justice: the historical and international legal responsibility of the former metropole towards the colonies, demands for restitution, reparations and apologies. However, the supranational integration processes which began in the second half of the 20th century pushed the issues of colonial legacy off the international agenda. It is only thanks to recent socio-political trends associated with multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism, struggles against privilege and social hierarchy, and new challenges to traditional foundations and values in general, that the anti-colonialist narrative has returned to the international discourse.

It is worth pointing out that the Black Lives Matter movement that rocked the United States in 2020 did not lead to any major political and social conflicts in the UK due to the lack of relevance of the slavery issue there. Although, as part of left liberal woke movement, several historical monuments were demolished and some urban sites associated with the colonial past got new names.

Nevertheless, a markedly more liberal agenda has accelerated the exodus of Caribbean countries from British influence. Last autumn, Barbados withdrew from the aegis of the monarchy, declaring itself a parliamentary republic, and Jamaica has made no secret of similar ambitions. Following them, the Belizean authorities announced the creation of a special commission to study the decolonisation experience of their Caribbean neighbours. The failed Caribbean tours of Prince William and his wife, as well as the Queen's youngest son Prince Edward and his wife in the spring of 2022 were also telling: the trips were accompanied by racist scandals (footage of Prince William greeting Jamaican children through a wire fence), large-scale protests against the monarchy, demands for an apology and compensation for British colonial crimes.

The developments in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) are also of interest in this context. In late April 2022, British authorities announced their intention to establish direct rule in the BVI after the arrest of Prime Minister Andrew Fahie in the United States on charges of drug trafficking. The move was controversial in the Caribbean and declared a retrograde step in the evolution of the democratic process that is inconsistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960. Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Truss backtracked, giving the BVI emergency government two years to implement anti-corruption reforms based on proposals by a commission set up by London in 2021 to investigate corruption, mismanagement of public funds and drug trafficking in the BVI.

The main issues of prosecuting colonial crimes. Today, there are no effective or universal mechanisms for protecting the rights and interests of former colonies. On the one hand, international law stipulates the liability of states for war crimes, acts of genocide and crimes against humanity. On the other hand, from a practical standpoint, there is a high standard of proof for establishing court proceedings and holding states accountable for violations of international law during the colonial and post-colonial periods, which includes the admission of guilt, repatriations, restitutions, redress and the perpetuation of memory by colonial powers. This includes debates on the statute of limitations, the inter-temporal principle, the status of former colonies as parties to international relations at the moment of perpetrating crimes, etc. In these circumstances, collective appeals to national courts and the work of ad hoc commissions serve as optimal legal tools for upholding historical justice.

In this connection, one should note an encouraging judicial precedent, even if the UK authorities may disagree. It regards a collective lawsuit by veterans of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. British service personnel imprisoned and brutally tortured them in 1952-1963. In 2009, over 5,000 community members enlisted the services of a local law firm and took their case to the High Court of Justice in London. They demanded that the British government admit that atrocities had been perpetrated against 200,000 Kenyans, and that they are paid 59.75 million pounds in damages. The Court accepted the lawsuit and rejected the defendant’s counterclaims about the responsibility of Kenya as the successor state for the crimes committed and the expiry of the statute of limitations.  In 2013, the sides reached a settlement out of court and agreed that the plaintiffs would receive 19.9 million pounds in damages, and that the UK would finance the construction of a memorial in Nairobi. Additionally, Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed sincere regret in connection with the crimes committed. Indicatively, similar subsequent lawsuits were rejected due to the expiry of the statute of limitations.

During the investigation of this case, it was revealed that authorities in the final period of the British Empire systematically destroyed archive materials proving the facts of genocide and other war crimes in order to avoid legal liability in the future. Today, this considerably complicates efforts to assess the scale of crimes committed by the colonial power.

The work of special commissions. Typically, given the scale and long-term nature of colonial crimes, the statute of limitation and the difficulty of gathering evidence, former colonies set up special national commissions to determine whether a crime has been committed, to gather information thoroughly and to examine the impact of the empires. On average, these commissions work for five years. Some of them are also tasked with bringing class action suits against colonial powers. The most notable case was filed by the African Reparations Commission, which in 1999 succeeded in attracting widespread media attention to colonial crimes in Africa by demanding that the former colonial powers pay $777 trillion in compensation for slave trade and plunder.

It is fair to say that the UN General Assembly's Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, adopted in 1974, stimulated interest in reparations. Its provisions spell out the right of states, territories and peoples who suffered from foreign occupation, foreign and colonial domination or apartheid to reparations and full compensation for the exploitation, depletion and damage caused to their natural and all other resources.

The activities of such commissions are the focus of the UN Human Rights Council. For example, the 2021 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, Fabian Salvioli[1], criticises their work for not paying sufficient attention to structural colonial violence and systemic political, economic and cultural isolation, as well as demands for satisfaction and memorialisation to restore dignity of victims. Instead, according to the Rapporteur, the commissions’ work is limited to addressing the consequences of violations of the rights to life and physical inviolability.

The most significant colonial crimes of Great Britain. The expansion of the British Empire had a long history and covered a vast geography, built mainly around the idea of cultural and religious exceptionalism of the British and the arrogant attitude towards the inhabitants and resources of the colonies, pragmatic to the point of cynicism. The Anglo-Saxons did not recognise indigenous populations as people but regarded the lands they occupied as appendages to provide raw materials, desperately fighting for their valuable resources, up to harshly suppressing any resistance. These factors may explain the unjustified scale of the atrocities that were committed by the British in the colonial and post-colonial era.

Great Britain was responsible for the creation of the first concentration camps. During the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, 45 “rescue camps” were established for the white population and 64 for the black. About 200,000 civilians passed through them, and 28,000 Boers died, including more than 26,000 women and children under 16. The number of deaths among the black population is unknown: no one reported their deaths since the British did not consider them human[2].

There were 12 concentration camps in Cyprus in 1946-1949 to contain the Jews who tried to flee from Europe to Palestine. Great Britain sought to prevent Jewish population in Mandatory Palestine from growing, so 52,000 Jews were sent to the Cypriot camps, including 2,000 children[3]. The added cynicism is that German prisoners of war were involved in the construction of these camps for the Jews and there was nothing but a fence to separate these two groups. In addition, in 1939-1948, there was a camp near Haifa, through which tens of thousands of Jews also passed. In 1947, two concentration camps were also created near Lübeck, Germany. The British also countered illegal migration to Palestine at sea by turning ships with Jewish Holocaust survivors aboard back to Europe with the most notorious case occurring in 1947 when the Exodus 1947, carrying 4,500 Jews, was sent back to Germany.

The following features may be noted in the British approaches to organising concentration camps:

• There is a high percentage of children among the prisoners who were used not for labour but as hostages in order to demand that their fathers surrender;
• during World War II and until 1948, the UK placed prisoners of war on its own territory as well as in Canada, the United States and North Africa; in order to use them as slave labour, in circumvention of the Geneva Convention guaranteeing the rights of prisoners of war, the British changed their status to “surrendered enemy personnel;”
• the British allowed other countries to set up concentration camps on their territory (the most infamous are six Polish camps in Scotland during World War II).

A significant number of Great Britain’s colonial-era crimes also resulted from the policy of playing off the contradictions of religious and ethnic groups living in the controlled territories, for example, by drawing artificial political borders without taking into consideration where people actually lived. This laid the foundation for most of the territorial disputes and religious and ethnic conflicts that have not been resolved to this day in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

The most illustrative example is the 1947 division of British India into two independent states, India and Pakistan, which provoked violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims, huge flows of refugees and famine, resulting in the death of about a million civilians and a massive migration of 18 million people, of which almost 4 million went missing[4]. Due to the uncertainty of the borderline, relations between India and Pakistan remain tense to this day and periodically turn into armed conflicts and terrorist attacks.

Another example is the creation in 1921 of the Emirate of Transjordan covering three quarters of Mandatory Palestine’s territory, then the tearing away of 8,100 sq km from Palestine to pass it to Syria in 1946 and the subsequent withdrawal of the British from the region in 1947, leaving their military contingent and weapons to the Arab countries, and an embargo on supplying arms to Palestine. All this had a major bearing in terms of inciting and influencing the Arab-Israeli conflict, which continues to this day.

Active interference in the internal affairs of third countries was a logical consequence of Britain’s approach to them. In the second half of the 18th century, in an attempt to expand its zone of influence and turn the trade balance with China in its favour, the British Empire flooded the Chinese market with smuggled opium, and then carried out a military invasion. The consequences of the Opium Wars were devastating for both the population and the economy of China. Millions of Chinese consumed opium. The country lost almost all of its sovereignty, becoming a semi-colony: a source of cheap labour and resources, as well as a market for colonial powers.

Another crime in this category is Operation Manna with the British armed invasion in Greece after its liberation from the Nazis in 1944-1945. In December 1944, the British staged a conflict between Greek partisans and collaborators, and then used a 100,000-strong British military contingent to bomb Athens and its suburbs for a month – the battle for the Kesariani neighbourhood came to be known in Greece as the Athenian Stalingrad. The Greek partisans completely lost to the British, and in 1945-1946, British terror followed. The situation is cynical in its irrationality: in fact, it was the agony of the British Empire losing its global dominance.

The unjustified cruelty of British officers in addition to the fact that political levers of pressure on the controlled territories had been exhausted also led to major humanitarian tragedies:

- The Amritsar Massacre, the ruthless suppression of a peaceful demonstration of Indians in Amritsar in 1919 was accompanied by firing at an unarmed crowd, mostly women, as a result of which 379 people were killed and 1,200 were injured. According to Indian sources, 1,000 people were killed and 1,500 injured. It is noteworthy that the British authorities do not consider this a colonial crime, merely expressing “regret for what happened.”

• The British Empire is also responsible for the systematic famine in India. This data is according to British sources: in 1770, 7 to 10 million people died from famine in Bengal[5], in 1780-1790, again millions of people died, in 1800-1825 – 1 million people, in 1850-1875 – 5 million people, in 1876-1878 (The Great Famine in Bombay and Madras) – 10 million people, in 1875-1902 – 26 million people[6], in 1896-1900 – 6 million people[7]. In 1943, up to 3.8 million people died from famine in Bengal, in the north and east of India[8]; according to one version, the British provoked food shortages in order to suppress the liberation movement in India.
• The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857-1859 in India turned into a massacre, as well as the destruction and looting of Delhi by the British.
• British troops responded to the 1931 October revolt in Cyprus by killing 15 and injuring 60 protesters, expelling and imposing other forms of punishment, ranging from imprisonment to fines against nearly 3,000 Cypriots.
• The Malayan communist uprising of 1948-1960, during which the so-called Batang Kali massacre took place in 1948. The full picture of events has not yet been disclosed. It is known that the colonists entered the village, separated the men from the women and children, and killed 24 people. In addition, a 12-year state of emergency was introduced, which resulted in 20,000 victims, of whom 12,000 were killed. The British practically eradicated the local communist guerrillas.
• The Kenya Emergency of 1952-1960 was accompanied by brutal suppression with the use of torture and humiliation of the uprising of the Mau Mau anti-colonial rebel movement, the murder of 300,000 peaceful Kikuyu (with 1.5 million people sent to camps[9]) and the so-called Chuka massacre, in which 20 rebels, including one child, were also killed.
• The anti-British uprising of the Arabs of Mesopotamia (today the territory of Iraq) in 1920 was completely suppressed with the use of the toxic mustard gas left over from the First World War. In total, the British killed about 10,000 rebels[10].
• The Windrush scandal. In 1948, immigrants from the Commonwealth and the colonies were granted the right to live in Great Britain and obtain citizenship (the project was curtailed after the famous speech by Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1968 about the rivers of blood that would flow through the streets of British cities when a racially alien tribe raises its own children on English soil). In the same year, the first settlers arrived from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush liner – all labour immigrants of 1948-1971 are called “the Windrush generation” by the name of the ship. The scandal broke out in 2018, when it became known that in 2010 the British Home Office destroyed all the entry files of the Windrush generation immigrants, as a result of which their descendants, most of whom were born in the UK, lost the right to reside in the country. Allegedly 164 people were illegally deported, detained and stopped at the border. It is noteworthy that even after the start of the parliamentary investigation, the Home Office did not take any steps to identify and return the illegally deported citizens. Moreover, the local staff deliberately interpreted the immigration legislation against the descendants of the Windrush generation.

The colonial genocide has also drastically changed the demographic picture not only in certain regions, but also on continents.

• According to various estimates, British colonialists took three[11] to 17 million people[12] out of Africa and transported them to Americas and the West Indies as slaves. The number of deaths during this process could be as much as five times higher. It is also believed that tens of millions of Africans were killed in attempts to kidnap them. It is noteworthy that in the dispute exposing slave trade for its unethical nature, the British insisted that by taking people out of the African continent, they saved them from inevitable death or slavery in their homeland. However, it was never mentioned that most of the wars were waged by local tribes for the sake of kidnapping people and their subsequent sale to the colonists.
• The colonisation of Australia in late 18th to the early 20th century went together with the extermination of at least half of the aborigines (according to some estimates, even up to 90-95 percent)[13]. The colonists equated natives with animals, hunting them, performing biological experiments on them (for example, infecting them with smallpox), and selling them into slavery. Indigenous peoples are still experiencing the effects of the historic genocide, being marginalised and discriminated against on the basis of identity, as well as poverty.
• The Black War in Tasmania (1820s-1830s): in a similar fashion to the massacre of the aborigines, the colonists exterminated up to a million harmless Tasmanians on a whim. The remaining 200 people were moved to a neighbouring island, some survivors also managed to assimilate among the colonists[14].
• 1,500 to 2,000 people living on the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean in 1960-1970 were forcibly evicted by the British under the pretext that they were contract workers so that the United States could establish a military base on the island[15]. Next, Chagos received the status of a marine reserve, which made it impossible for the indigenous people to return. In May 2019, the UN General Assembly demanded that the UK cease management of the Chagos Archipelago and transfer it to Mauritius, of which it is an integral part, within six months, citing the ruling of the International Court of Justice. Three years later, the decision has not been implemented.

The memory of atrocious colonial practices continues to fuel British perceptions of military tactics. The BBC exposed the special forces of the British Special Air Service, who in November 2010 – April 2011 repeatedly and illegally massacred citizens of Afghanistan: in particular, they detained and then killed locals with captured weapons. The journalists found out that the fighters of just one of the special force units could be involved in killing 54 people.[16]

The 2003 invasion of Iraq as part of the American coalition was also carried out according to historical patterns, with violence, looting and a disregard for international law. Following the end of hostilities, the British illegally countered the activities of human rights activists, the media, international courts, and commissions that shed light on their atrocities. However, despite London’s opposition, it has been proven that in 2003, an Iraqi died from 93 wounds inflicted by two British soldiers in a British cell in Basra. In 2016, London even announced its intention to put an end to “false charges against our troops on an industrial scale” by removing them from the scope of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Statements about possible withdrawal from the ECHR were repeated in June 2022 after the European Court of Human Rights blocked the sending of illegal migrants from the UK to Rwanda, where, according to British plans, migrants were supposed to live and go through the asylum procedure. At the same time, the authorities’ promise not to deport Ukrainian refugees to Africa deserves attention. In fact, this means deportation of illegal migrants from third world countries to Rwanda (perhaps, the British experience of organising concentration camps outside the metropole played a role).

In general, the Ukrainian story effectively brings out London’s continuing racist approach to the “uncivilised” world, whether it is what is expressed by a BBC correspondent on air: “…it’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed every day.” or how the pro-government Daily Telegraph writes about Ukrainians: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts, vote in free elections and read uncensored newspapers. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations.”

The racism rooted in British institutions regularly draws attention: recently, in June 2022, The Guardian, citing a report from the Institute for Race Relations, spoke about the rooting of a culture of extremism and racist views in British law enforcement agencies, and also recalled recent scandals with the exchange of racist materials by police officers (extensive sharing of photos of two murdered black sisters and correspondence with jokes about the rape and murder of black women and children).

It also became known that the University of Coventry had developed a mandatory course in British history for 36,000 Home Office employees, the launch of which was scheduled for June 2021, but is still delayed. Civil servants do not agree on how it covers themes of the colonial heritage, including racism, and are trying to wipe out passages with inconvenient truths. According to the developers of the project and journalists, such historical amnesia speaks very eloquently about the enduring relevance of the problem of systemic racism in the enforcers’ ranks.

Decolonisation of cultural property. The issue of returning cultural heritage property to former colonies is still unresolved. As for international law, some instruments, such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, do not cover the issue of colonial-era acquisitions. In others, such as the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, most former colonial powers are not parties to this convention. The mechanisms stipulated by the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and UN General Assembly Resolution 73/130, Return or Restitution of Cultural Property to the Countries of Origin, are not legally binding.

At the national level, the import of cultural property is protected by the 2002 Export Control Act, the 2003 Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act, and Statutory Instrument No 2759: The Export of Objects of Cultural Interest (Control) Order of 2003.

The United Kingdom, being the richest heir of colonial cultural heritage items, which are as strategic a national symbol as monarchy or football, is struggling with the cultural postcolonial agenda.

The most valuable contested museum artefacts include sculptures from Parthenon, the so-called Elgin Marbles, the Hoa Hakananai'a, a lava statue from Easter Island, over 6,000 artefacts from the Australian indigenous peoples (the largest collection outside Australia), the Maqdala Collection (400 artefacts, including a gold crown used by Ethiopian kings). In addition, Sri Lanka has filed a request for the restitution of over 3,000 items of cultural heritage: statues, coins, ivory, personal jewellery, household items, jewellery boxes, weapons, musical instruments, toys, paintings, masks, manuscripts, and fabrics. Sudan is demanding that a bust of Roman Emperor Augustus be returned, along with two skulls of Sudanese warriors and other valuable military artefacts, including armour, clothes and banners. Nigeria claims that the British Museum should return the major collection of the Benin Bronzes.

London’s response rhetoric is symptomatic. In responding to calls from Nigeria and Germany (Germany already returned its part of the collection to the Africans) to return the cultural items looted in a punitive British expedition in 1897, a British Museum representative said that the circumstances in which these items were brought to the museum were described on its website, while “the strength of the collection is its breadth and depth, which allows millions of visitors an understanding of the cultures of the world and how they interconnect.” Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a major global collection of applied and decorative arts, also believes that the return of the artefacts will make it impossible to “position objects beyond particular cultural or ethnic identities, curate them within a broader intellectual or aesthetic lineage, and situate them within a wider, richer framework of relationships.” He also believes that “universal” museums have not reached their limits and they protect culture from becoming fixed and nationalised. 

The British understand that any one-time courtesy towards former colonies might result in increased pressure from them and the loss of its own colonial assets, and therefore they abstain from attempts to radically approach cultural restitution, suggesting that the public will be content with half-measures. Thus, not without their own gain, instead of returning cultural heritage items to former colonies, they organise visits of their representatives for a temporary reunion with the sacred artefacts (a delegation of Indian people in Oxford in 2009), hold major exhibitions devoted to the culture of former colonies (the Victoria and Albert Museum is currently hosting a major exhibition of African designers to mark the Year of Africa in 1960 (the parade of sovereignties), as well as provide items from their museums as a loan without transferring ownership rights (the story with Ethiopia’s request to return artefacts taken in the 19th century).

Proposals. In the context of the above, we can identify the following drawbacks in London’s approach to its colonial past:

- substituting historical reality with positive mythmaking (the narrative that the Crown brought civilisation, democracy and free trade to barbarians; and that colonisation did not significantly change the initial capability of dependent territories to develop statehood);

- historical amnesia or keeping silent and refusing to repent colonial crimes and consequences of British expansion (the authorities only express regret over a tragedy while trying to shift responsibility to the colonial administrations that permitted the atrocities);

- the preservation of imperial ambitions and a racist/cynical attitude to “uncivilised” countries (problems with the relocation of refugees to Rwanda, the Chagos Archipelago and the BVI);

- active resistance to establishing the truth about colonial crimes (hindering the work of special commissions and criminal investigations, and restricting access to declassified archives) and the use of illegal methods for this purpose (bribes, blackmail, etc.).

It is notable that the memory of Pax Britannica, which constitutes the basis of the national concept, only strengthens the “little England complex” of becoming vulnerable to external threats without its former “great power” standing. This is the root cause of the proclivity for inconsistent political moves.

For example, the fear that the country would become “provincialised” if it remained subordinate to the West European supranational institutions led to Brexit, which cut Britain off from the global financial and political mainstream. That self-inflicted blow to the British globalist project has launched isolation processes, undermined the country’s foreign policy ambitions and increased its dependence on the United States.

London’s replacement of a clear foreign policy strategy with situational populism and stubborn attempts to retain its dominance in the Commonwealth countries and enlarge its sphere of influence by becoming involved in local conflicts is reminiscent of the agony of the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s, when it refused to accept its inability to influence global processes.

In light of the above, the attempts to call Britain to account for its colonial crimes and their consequences should include efforts to keep this issue in the focus of attention of international organisations, the global public and media. Without the influence of human rights activists and media repercussions, such investigations and court hearings seldom yield any result.

Today, the shift of the agenda to the left has made the discourse on revising the colonial legacy relevant for the public and academia. Consequently, there is considerable potential for cooperation at the Human Rights Council and directly with the numerous above-mentioned special commissions that are collecting evidence and are formulating legal claims. It is also worth encouraging some human rights activists, such as Shashi Tharoor, who has been investigating the crimes of British colonialism in India.