MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands representatives take the Islanders' case for self-determination to the UN

Dorothy “Dot” Gould and Michael Goss, addressed the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation, known as the Committee of 24 (C24), on June 25,

Two members of the Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly, Dorothy “Dot” Gould and Michael Goss, addressed the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation, known as the Committee of 24 (C24), on June 25, where they defended the right to self-determination of the archipelago's inhabitants and renewed their invitation for the body to send a visiting mission to the Islands, something that has never happened since the UN began considering the question in 1965.

The two addresses took complementary approaches. Gould, who holds the Health and Social Services portfolio and represents the rural community, centered her message on personal testimony and a description of Island society. She recalled moving to the Islands from England at the age of five, three years before the 1982 Argentine invasion. “I want this committee to understand what it feels like, as a child, to have someone try to take your home from you,” she said. She described a community of around 3,600 people with more than seventy countries of birth and stressed that the territory funds healthcare and university education for its residents from its own economy, without asking the United Kingdom for money, and that it holds an A+ credit rating from S&P Global.

Goss, a sixth-generation farmer and mechanical engineer who holds the Natural Resources portfolio, focused his remarks on the legal argument and on the resolution the committee considers each year. He questioned the call for Argentina and the United Kingdom to negotiate the Islands' future without including their inhabitants, and argued that, since the Argentine Constitution sets the recovery of sovereignty as a “permanent and non-renounceable” objective, the outcome of any negotiation would be predetermined. “That is not a negotiation. That is a transfer of ownership dressed as diplomacy,” he said.

The legislator recalled the 2013 referendum, in which, with a 92% turnout, 99.8% voted to remain a self-governing British Overseas Territory. Goss said the Argentine section of the UN working paper claims that no organisation observed that vote, which he called incorrect: according to him, it was overseen by an international mission led by the United States, with observers from Canada, Uruguay, Chile and New Zealand. He also referred to fisheries, which account for about 58% of the Islands' gross domestic product, and to the international waters of the so-called Blue Hole, with no fisheries management organisation or catch limits.

Goss also referred to the cooperation package that the United Kingdom and Argentina agreed in September 2024 —which included fisheries data exchange, flight connectivity and a relatives' visit to the Argentine cemetery. He held that the Islands delivered by facilitating the visit of Argentine families that December, but that the flight and the fisheries-data exchange did not materialize. “We remain willing,” he said. Both legislators drew a distinction between the “interests” mentioned in the resolution and the “wishes” of the Islanders: “The difference is between being heard and being spoken for,” Goss said, stressing that they were not asking any delegation to take a position on sovereignty, only that the inhabitants' right to be heard be recognized.

The presentation coincides with the annual consideration of the question at the C24, which routinely adopts —without a vote and promoted by Latin American countries— a resolution requesting Argentina and the United Kingdom to resume negotiations to peacefully resolve the sovereignty dispute. Buenos Aires claims sovereignty over the archipelago as a state policy and holds that General Assembly resolutions do not provide for the self-determination of the Islanders, whom it regards as a transplanted population. The United Kingdom, for its part, makes any negotiation conditional on the wishes of the inhabitants.

Falkland Islands UNC24 Speeches June 2026 by MercoPress