BUT for the fact that the hard-pressed British taxpayer is being committed to paying upwards of £30billion for the privilege of allowing the Americans to use the island base of Diego Garcia – part of the Chagos Islands cluster – Starmer’s apparent sell-out leaves me cold.
But there is, on the face of it, a more profound question of why the British government is ceding the sovereignty of a group of islands which it has administered since 1814 when it took control of them from the French following the Napoleonic Wars and have never been owned by Mauritius. It does not seem right that we should be handing over British territory to that country.
The more one looks at this, the more bizarre it gets. Before 1814, Mauritius was not an independent nation. Prior to British control, it was a French colony from 1715 to 1810, known as Île de France, from which the French also administered the Chagos islands.
Before that, the Dutch controlled the island from 1598 to 1710, naming it after Prince Maurice of Nassau, but their settlement was not continuous, and they abandoned it by 1710.
Earlier still, the island was uninhabited until European arrival, with no evidence of an indigenous population or independent nation-state. Thus, Mauritius became a nation in its own right only on March 12, 1968, after gaining independence from the United Kingdom, and had never been in a position to call the Chagos islands its own territory.
The linkage between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands, therefore, is an administrative one, which started with the French, and was continued by the British in 1814 when they took over both Mauritius and the Chagos Islands. Although the two territories were separated by 1,300 miles of ocean, Chagos was treated as a dependency of Mauritius.
During colonial rule, the Chagos Islands were governed from Mauritius, with shared legal, economic, and administrative systems (e.g., Mauritius issued stamps, managed trade and appointed officials for the Chagos).
However, in 1965, Harold Wilson’s Labour government – in anticipation of Mauritian independence – separated the Chagos Islands from Mauritius, creating the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). This was with the agreement of the Mauritian government, which received £3million in compensation, but Mauritius later claimed this was coerced as a condition for independence.
In the minds of many, and certainly the British government at the time, this should have been the end of it. Certainly, successive governments acted as if they owned the islands.
Between 1967 and 1973, initially under Wilson and then Heath, the UK forcibly removed approximately 1,500 to 2,000 Chagossians, the native inhabitants, from the islands, primarily to make way for a US-UK military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island.
The UK justified this by what has been acknowledged to be a false claim, that there was no permanent population, ostensibly violating international law. The displaced Chagossians were relocated to Mauritius, the Seychelles and later the UK, where many faced poverty and discrimination. But the population transfer to Mauritius strengthened the cultural ties.
This notwithstanding, successive governments of Mauritius have never recognised the British Indian Ocean Territory and have been pursuing a claim to the islands in a sporadic fashion since independence.
The first break in the British government position seems to have come in 2012 when David Cameron held ‘unprecedented’ talks with the prime minister of Mauritius over the ‘return’ of the Chagos Islands.
By then, the UK had been the focus of a number of lawsuits but real breakthrough came in 2019 when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivered an advisory opinion ruling that the UK’s continued administration of the Chagos Islands was unlawful, breaching the UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), which prohibits the breakup of colonial territories before independence.
In affirming Mauritius’s sovereignty claim, the court added weight to a UN General Assembly resolution in 2017, which was further reinforced by another resolution in 2021, each backed by large majorities which framed the issue as incomplete decolonisation.
What the ICJ was relying on was a principle in international law known as uti possidetis juris, which holds that newly independent states inherit the territorial boundaries of their colonial predecessor at the time of independence.
This principle has been widely applied in post-colonial contexts (e.g., Latin America, Africa), aimed at ensuring that colonial administrative units remain intact to prevent territorial disputes.
Although the Chagos islands had been separated from Mauritius prior to independence, the Mauritian government argued that its agreement had been under duress, claiming that the Chagos Islands had been wrongfully detached and should have remained part of its sovereign territory upon independence. The ICJ’s 2019 advisory opinion accepted this, stating that the Chagos Islands were an integral part of the colonial territory of Mauritius.
And, although the Chagos Islands’ connection to Mauritius stemmed from British colonial administration (and French rule before 1810), this – the Mauritian government argued – was sufficient under international law to establish territorial rights.
It was the UN General Assembly resolution of 2021 which overwhelmingly supported Mauritius’s claim, increasing diplomatic pressure on the UK to address the issue. Continued resistance risked further international condemnation and potential legal challenges.
Facing growing isolation on the issue, particularly after Brexit – which reduced European support for its position – African nations, the African Union and the Non-Aligned Movement unanimously backed Mauritius, framing the issue as a matter of decolonisation. Even the Maldives, previously a UK ally on the issue, switched support to Mauritius in 2022.
With no one supporting the UK’s claim in the UN, some action was unavoidable, with the UK arguing that without the deal, Mauritius could win future legal battles, potentially forcing the UK’s hand with the complete loss of any rights over the Diego Garcia base, allowing hostile powers such as China to establish a presence on the islands, threatening Western interests.
On this basis, the picture of an unreasoned ‘surrender’ doesn’t look quite the same as the Conservative opposition is making out, with Badenoch asserting that the deal sets a precedent for challenges to other British territories such as the Falklands or Gibraltar – which it doesn’t, as uti possidetis juris would not apply.
It could nevertheless be argued that a robust, post-Brexit UK should ignore the uti possidetis juris principle in international law and go our own way. But to do so could have unfortunate consequences elsewhere
Although uti possidetis juris is most commonly applied to post-colonial states, it has also been extended to the dissolution of federative states such as the Soviet Union. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, the principle was used to determine the borders of newly independent states, including Ukraine, based on the administrative boundaries of the Soviet republics.
Crimea was part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) from 1954, when it was transferred from the Russian SFSR by Soviet decree, until the USSR’s collapse in 1991. Upon independence, Ukraine inherited the administrative boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR, including Crimea, under the principle of uti possidetis juris.
This was formalised in agreements such as the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine and the 1991 Belavezha Accords, which dissolved the USSR and recognized the republics’ borders.
Under uti possidetis juris, therefore, Ukraine’s claim to Crimea is based on the administrative boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR at the time of independence in 1991. Crimea’s status as an Autonomous Republic within Ukraine, with its own constitution and local governance, does not negate its inclusion within Ukraine’s sovereign territory, as autonomy does not imply sovereignty under international law.
Thus, if the UK were to turn round and reject the Mauritian claim in its entirety, it would have to concede that the Ukrainian claim to Crimea was weak – something which goes against the entire thrust of British policy towards Ukraine.
Basically, we’re trapped into accepting the validity of international law, in which case the Mauritian claim is sound, and the UK had no option but to concede it, then making arrangements to secure the use of the Diego Garcia base.
But since the uti possidetis juris is a very ancient principle, with its roots in Roman law, and widely recognised in the 19th century, we seem to be suffering from the sins of our fathers – Wilson and Heath together failing to honour the principle.
If the primary fault lies with Wilson’s Labour government, though, it is rather appropriate that a successor Labour government should be on the rack, in trying to clean up an historic mess.
This article appeared in Turbulent Times on May 23 and is reproduced by kind permission.
