Constitutional law ; ;Crown colony ordinance purporting to banish resident citizens and prohibit presence ultra vires ;R v Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Another, Ex parte Bancoult: DC (Laws LJ and ;Gibbs J): 3 November 2000 ;The Chagos Archipelago was divided from Mauritius and constituted as a separate colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) by virtue of the British Indian Ocean Territory Order 1965 (SI 1965 No 1920), which provided for the appointment of a Commissioner.

By s.11(1) it provided that the Commissioner may make laws for the peace, order and good government of the Territory...

The Immigration Ordinance of the British Indian Ocean Territory No.1 of 1971, purportedly made under s.11 of the 1965 Order, effected the compulsory removal of the whole of the population of BIOT, which included the applicant, to Mauritius.

The applicant applied for judicial review of the decisions made by the Commissioner for BIOT that the 1971 Ordinance banishing British Dependent Territory citizens resident there, and the policy by which the applicant was prevented from returning to and residing in BIOT, was lawful.

;Sir Sydney Kentridge QC, Laurens Fransman QC and Anthony Bradley (instructed by Sheridans) for the applicant.

David Pannick QC, Philip Sales and Cecilia Ivimy (instructed by Treasury Solicitor) for the respondents.

;Held, allowing the application and quashing the Ordinance, that there was no authority for the proposition that the existence of effective local courts negatived the jurisdiction of the Queens Bench to issue certiorari extraterritorially; that s.4 of the 1971 Ordinance effectively exiled the indigenous population from the territory where they were belongers and forbade their return, but the peace, order and good government of any territory meant nothing save by reference to the territorys population, who were to be governed, not removed; that only in a rare, exceptional case would the removal of people from their homeland make for the territorys peace, order and good government; that the removal had been carried out for high political reasons, and the military security reasons for removal could not reasonably be said to touch the peace, order and good government of BIOT in the Wednesbury sense (Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223) or even by a less intrusive reasonableness test; and that there was no principled basis on which s.4 could be justified as having been empowered by s.11 of the 1965 Order, and it had no other conceivable source of lawful authority.

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