Britain has said in the past that it would cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands only when they are no longer needed for defence purposes. But the government’s line is shifting
Britain was well into the process of dismantling its empire. But in 1965, the same year it gave up the Gambia and the Maldives, it also created a new colony. During negotiations with Mauritius over its independence, Britain carved out 58 remote islands, known as the Chagos Archipelago, for itself. These became the British Indian Ocean Territory . Between 1968 and 1973 the islands’ population was expelled.
The islands’ inhabitants were initially moved to Mauritius and the Seychelles, where many of them still live. In 2002 Britain granted citizenship to those born in Chagos, and to their children; in 2022 their descendants were included, too. Around 3,000 Chagossians already live in Crawley, close to London’s Gatwick airport, into which the first migrants arrived; authorities there are braced for up to 5,000 more to arrive now that citizenship has been offered more widely.
In 2021, adjudicating in a dispute between Mauritius and the Maldives, the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea argued that “Mauritius’s sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago can be inferred from thehas amended its official map of the world, which since 2020 has shown Chagos as an undisputed part of Mauritius. The issue is an irritant in other contexts.
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