“What Figures Lurk on Madame Elysé’s Path? Reflections on Philippe Sands’ The Last Colony,” an article by University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, has just been published at 38 Temple International & Comparative Law Journal 91 (2024).

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at Georgia Law.

The “What Figures”  article is her contribution to the journal’s symposium issue based on a book about the Chagos Islands and the International Court of Justice advisory opinion, written by University College London Law Professor Philippe Sands, who was a barrister in those proceedings.

The issue also includes a foreword by Sands and a co-authored dialogue between Diane F. Orentlicher and Morton H. Halperin, as well as articles by Dan Bodansky, Christopher J. Borgen, Jorge Contesse, Peter G. Danchin, Jeffrey Dunoff, Margaret M. deGuzman, Mark A. Drumbl, Jean Galbraith, Rachel López, Jonathan H. Marks, Elizabeth Nwarueze, Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Ayodeji Kamau Perrin, and Sebastian von Massow.

Here’s the abstract for Amann’s article, which is available here:

“One person’s life forms the core around which Philippe Sands’ The Last Colony explores the events leading up to the advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences of Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965. That person is Liseby Bertrand Elysé, who was born in 1953 in Chagos, then forcibly removed to Mauritius in 1973. Her efforts to return home eventually brought her to a 2018 hearing at The Hague, where she spoke to the International Court of Justice bench by means of a subtitled video. This essay, which appears in a symposium issue on Sands’ book, investigates the ethics, the effectiveness, and the emancipatory potential of the author’s telling of the story of the Chagossian woman he most often calls ‘Madame Elysé.’”