Chagos Islands ‘integral’ to Mauritius, top UN court told

THE HAGUE: Mauritius told the UN’s top court that the Britishruled Chagos Islands are ‘integral’ to its territory and that the Indian Ocean island chain was handed to London ‘under duress’.

Hearings opened yesterday before the International Court of Justice in The Hague where judges are to hear arguments over the future status of the remote archipelago – home to a strategic joint US military base but territory claimed by Mauritius.

“More than fifty years after independence... the process of decolonisation of Mauritius remains incomplete,” former Mauritian president Anerood Jugnauth said.

This was “as a result of the unlawful detachment of an integral part of our territory on the eve of our independence,” he told the judges.

In a diplomatic blow to Britain, the UN General Assembly in June last year adopted a resolution presented by Mauritius and backed by African countries asking the ICJ to offer a legal opinion on the island chain’s fate.

The ICJ’s 15 judges started listening to arguments on the ‘legal consequences of (Britain’s) separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius’ in 1965, shortly before Port Louis’ independence from its colonial ruler. The African Union and a remarkable number of 22 countries – which also includes the US, Germany and several Asian and Latin American nations – are to make statements during the fourday hearing. After the hearings, the ICJ will hand down a non-binding ‘advisory opinion’, but the judges’ ruling may take several months or even years.

An opinion in favour of Mauritius may strengthen Port Louis’ hand in future negotiations or could lay the foundation for an eventual formal claim before the ICJ – set up in 1946 and which also rules in disputes between countries.

Britain detached the islands from Mauritius, then a semiautonomous British territory, using decolonisation talks as leverage and paying £3 million for them at the time.

Jugnauth said Mauritian officials were given ‘no room for any choice’ in keeping the Chagos Islands during the 1965 independence talks.

— AFP photo File photo shows Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago and site of a major US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean leased from Britain in 1966.