Port Egmont on Saunders Island in the Falkland Islands. Here in January 1765 Captain John Byron claimed the Falklands for Britain. The picture shows the ruins of the warehouse and dock (1766).

Getting it right: the real history of the Falklands/Malvinas
A reply to the Argentine seminar of 3 December 2007
by Graham Pascoe and Peter Pepper © 2008

On 3 December 2007 a seminar entitled “Argentine Rights and Sovereignty”, organised by the Argentine Embassy, was held at the London School of Economics, at which the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands was publicly presented in Britain for the first time.

The claim to the Falkland Islands is now a significant element in Argentine foreign policy, though as we shall demonstrate below, there have been long periods when Argentine governments accepted that the islands were British. The Argentine claim has been presented annually only since 1945, when it was mentioned at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, in a single sentence on Argentine territories (without mentioning the Falklands by name); since 1964 the annual Argentine statements of the claim at the United Nations have been much more extensive.

However, those statements, like Argentine books, leaflets, and letters to British MPs, contain many important omissions and some extremely serious historical errors. This booklet addresses the most serious of those omissions and errors, and briefly recounts the true history of the Falkland Islands and the Falklands dispute. It is a highly condensed version of a detailed (1,000-page) study of the subject, The Falklands Saga: a Critical Study of the Falkland Islands in History and International Law, by Graham Pascoe and Peter Pepper (forthcoming, probably 2009).