The Malvinas/Falklands Between History and Law

In 2008, Graham Pascoe and Peter Pepper, two British authors who are not academics, published both in English and in Spanish a pamphlet entitled “Getting it Right: the Real History of the Falklands/Malvinas”. Since then, a variety of versions of this pamphlet have been published, some abridged, and some not; the most recent version, officially distributed by the British government in the United Nations Decolonization Committee in June 2015, was pompously entitled: “False Falklands History at the United Nations. How Argentina misled the UN in 1964 – and still does”. This simply constitutes an attempt to rewrite history. British pamphlet tries in vain to distort the the solid historical-legal arguments which prove Argentine sovereignty and to convince the reader that the islands are inhabited by a multinational population entitled to the right of self-determination. The work of Marcelo Kohen and Facundo Rodríguez refutes each of the new British arguments, both from the historical and legal point of view. It gives the reader first-hand information, much of it hitherto not exploited in the abundant bibliography. It is an indispensable source for understanding the positions of the parties to the dispute whose solution is still pending.