Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

As things stand, if we pass the Bill, we will facilitate the coming into force of a treaty that will create a power vacuum in relation to at least 59 islands of immense geostrategic importance, which threatens instability. This would be a catastrophic international relations error. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will say a few words in support of the noble Lord’s amendment, which seems really sensible: we should not have been paying to give away British territory without a full and proper assessment of who was going to take it over. This all boils down to whether we trust Mauritius. My feeling is that, while I have probably a great deal of respect for Mauritian people, I am not sure that the Government of Mauritius is one that we would genuinely want to trust in the way that this whole treaty is doing.

I also detect a feeling among the Government and perhaps Whips that, really, we are all wasting our time here: “What on earth are we doing spending all this time?” As the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, said, we have seen how little time was spent on this and how quickly it came through once the election was over and the new Government were in place. Suddenly, this all was happening. That is why it is important that, even if there are very few people here, we consider all these issues. In the long term, this will all be recorded. There will be a time in the future when many people look back and say, “Oh, perhaps we should have considered that more when it came”.

I do not believe that Mauritius has treated Chagossians who live in Mauritius very well. Yes, there are a few who have done obviously very well and are now out cajoling and saying how wonderful it is that Mauritius is going to take over the islands, but the reality is that they have not been treated well. You need to just talk to any of the Chagossians who are here to discover what has been going on. That was when there was some kind of input from our Government; what on earth is going to happen when the British Government no longer have any say in what is happening in Mauritius?

We need a proper, detailed assessment of the ability of the Government in Mauritius to not just look after the welfare of Chagossians who are there, and in the future, but to look after the whole archipelago and obey the terms of the treaty. The treaty may not be tough enough, but, at the very least, we want to make sure that, if there is one, they carry through their side of it. I just have a real feeling that, once this is all signed and sealed, so many people will forget about what has happened and the Mauritian Government will have an easy time doing anything they want, and mostly not doing things that they should be doing to preserve those wonderful islands and the people who should be allowed to go back there. So I support this amendment.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for their contributions on the noble Lord’s Amendment 20K, which, much like his Amendment 20J in the previous group, asks a specific question of the Government, which I think gets to the heart of the process that was apparently followed by Ministers in reaching agreement on the terms of the treaty.

Clearly, Ministers will have had to consider other issues beyond the claim, which we have debated at length, that the sovereignty of the archipelago was somehow threatened by a binding legal judgment. The long-term security and effective management of the archipelago will, if the Government get their way, be delivered by the Government of Mauritius. We surely cannot have decided to pass that responsibility over to the Mauritian Government without first assessing their ability to manage the islands that we are, well, not giving t them but paying them to take. Would the Minister consider publishing the details of the Government’s assessment of Mauritius’s ability to manage and protect the islands effectively?

In an earlier group, we debated Mauritius’s responsibility for illegal migrants arriving on the islands, but this is just one of the relevant administrative questions that should have been considered by Ministers before an agreement was reached with the Mauritian Government. For example, was the fact that Mauritius does not even have a navy considered a relevant fact when the UK Government formed a view of the Mauritian Government’s ability to manage the islands?

The Mauritian National Coast Guard consists of one offshore patrol vessel, two midshore patrol vessels and 10 fast interceptor boats. As has been said repeatedly, the Chagos Archipelago is approximately 1,250 miles away from Mauritius. Do the UK Government feel that Mauritius’s coastguard is adequately equipped to deal with the challenges it will face as a result of this treaty? Can the Minister confirm whether her department have had any discussions whatever with the Mauritians about increasing their coastguard’s resources in light of their responsibility for the archipelago? If they even had a boat that could reach the distance, that would be a step forward. Will this be monitored by the UK Government on an ongoing basis and raised appropriately through the joint commission, or will we just say that we have handed the islands over and it is now the Mauritians’ responsibility, when we know from all available evidence that they have no capacity whatever to do any of that management?

The Mauritian coastguard’s role is not only important for the Mauritian Government’s access to and administration of the islands. The coastguard will, presumably, play a role in establishing and maintaining the marine protected area that the Minister has told us at great length that they are establishing. What discussions have Ministers had with their Mauritian counterparts to fully understand their plans to protect this important marine protected area? It does not have any boats that can even reach the islands, never mind protect the islands from any access by foreign vessels. Can the Minister confirm whether the UK Government are satisfied that the Mauritian Government have or are about to acquire the capabilities needed to maintain the protected area? When this was debated on the previous day of Committee, the Minister said:

“The MPA will be for the Mauritian Government to implement”.—[Official Report, 18/11/25; col. 801.]


I am sure it will, but have we not given any thought whatever to their ability to implement that?

We understand that this would be the responsibility of the Mauritian Government if the Bill goes through, but does the Minister think that there is any responsibility whatever for the UK Government to ensure that those nations with whom we make agreements are able to practically fulfil their obligations before we then sign a treaty? It is essential that we should have some clarity on this process that Ministers have followed in establishing that Mauritius has not just committed to the terms of the treaty but is in a position to be able to honour the terms of the treaty if and when it finally comes into force. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

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[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

That is true of a party that votes against it at Third Reading in the House of Commons and then seems largely supportive of the deal here. So, yes, that could be a perfectly good opportunity, but that can be applied in several parts of the body politic.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

I am getting rather tired of this Front-Bench thing about what the last Government did. The reality is that the last Government did not sign any treaty. They may have been talking. They could have talked and talked, but they did not sign a treaty. This Government came in and signed a treaty.

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We are told that this must be done because it stabilises the territory, removes uncertainty and doubt, and reassures our allies. It will not remove uncertainty. A dispute—a rather monetary one, let us be honest—with a country that had very little emotional attachment to this archipelago will be replaced by a new dispute with people who do feel attached to it, who refuse to recognise Mauritian sovereignty, and who will urge this country to take up its ancestral responsibilities and press their claim on their behalf. I hope that a future Government will act on that, since this one obviously will not. Either way, let us not pretend that the issue will be quelled simply by the stroke of a pen. You cannot efface people’s sense of nationality and belonging by bureaucratic fiat. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, my Amendment 50B is very clear and simple, and nothing to do with security on Diego Garcia or the details of the treaty between Mauritius and the United Kingdom. It is simple: it is for our Government to recognise the Chagossian people in the law of the United Kingdom as an indigenous people of the Chagos Archipelago.

I raise this because so many of the Chagossians we have met and know are men and women who have lived on these islands, who were baptised in the island chapels, who fished, who tended their gardens, who raised children and buried their dead there. They are the indigenous people of the Chagos Archipelago. It is important that what they have asked for, that they are recognised by our country, is agreed to.

The need for this amendment arises because even now, more than half a century after their removal, the Chagossian people are still being told by Ministers that they never existed as a permanent population, that their islands were never self-governing in any meaningful sense and that there is therefore no question of self-determination. Only last week, on the first day in Committee, the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, repeated that claim, saying:

“The Chagos Archipelago has no permanent population nor has ever been self-governing. No question of self-determination for its population can therefore arise”.—[Official Report, 18/11/25; col. 795.]


That statement is not true. It is contradicted by every serious historical study, by the records in the National Archives, by the findings of the International Court of Justice, by the judgment of our own courts and most importantly by the lived memory of the men and women who have written to and met us and live all over in the diaspora.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannan, said that he would not go into the history, but it is important when we are discussing a people that we understand the history. Archival records from the 19th and 20th centuries list births, marriages and burials across multiple generations on Peros Banhos, Salomon and Diego Garcia. Parish registers from Notre Dame de L’Assomption on Diego Garcia record entire family lines. Children were born there, married there and died there. The High Court in the Bancoult judgments accepted that the Chagossians were a settled people. The International Court of Justice—one of the reasons we have this treaty—in its 2019 advisory opinion recognised the Chagossians as the people of the territory with a right to self-determination. Research and documents from various academics have shown that there is at least 150 to 170 years of continuous multigenerational residence.

That is what an indigenous people is; that is what a permanent population is. Yet the Government continue to repeat a narrative first invented back in 1968, when the Foreign Office issued internal instructions to describe the Chagossians in public as temporary contract workers to avoid United Nations scrutiny. Those instructions are still in the archives and still legible. They show unequivocally that the United Kingdom knew the truth then, and it should know the truth now. It is time for this Parliament in discussing this treaty to put the truth into law.

The Minister also claimed that the islands were never self-governing but, as every historian of the archipelago now agrees, the islands were in practice run not by resident British administrators, who were almost never present, but by the Chagossians themselves. Families organised communal work, maintained chapels and community buildings and settled disputes. Testimony from multiple surviving islanders shows that respected elders served as local leaders.

One of the older Chagossian families that has been mentioned before in Committee, the Mandarin family of Peros Banhos, has given oral testimony that their ancestor, Jean Charles Mandarin, a blacksmith serving the whole island, was nominated by the community to act as a local headman in the long absence of any resident British authority. His leadership was even recorded in a scholarly Brill volume on the dispossession of the Chagos Islands, describing him as “a thorn in the flesh of the administration”. His grandson, Fernand Mandarin, born on Peros Banhos, later led the Chagossian Social Committee, represented his people at the United Nations and wrote one of the most detailed oral histories of island life. Today, his descendants continue that leadership in ongoing legal actions before the High Court. How can the Minister stand in this Chamber and say there was no permanent population and no self-organisation when the evidence is so overwhelmingly clear?

The amendment puts this right. It recognises in law what the world’s historians, courts and international institutions have already recognised: that the Chagossians are the indigenous people of the Chagos Islands. The amendment clearly defines them as those born on the islands

“prior to their depopulation between 1968 and 1973”

and their direct descendants. It requires the Secretary of State, when exercising any function under the Bill, to have regard to their identity, cultural integrity and rights.

The amendment is necessary, because the Bill does exactly the opposite with Clauses 2 to 4, which would abolish the British Indian Ocean Territory for every island except Diego Garcia, stripping away the only remaining statutory recognition of the Chagossian people’s historic and legal connection to their homeland. It would remove the very provisions in the British Nationality Act through which they are currently recognised in law. It would hand their homeland to another state without any act of self-determination, despite the clear findings of the International Court of Justice that the Chagossian people are entitled to that right.

We now know what that means in practice. Mauritian authorities have already begun issuing new birth certificates to Chagossians, in which the place of birth is rewritten as Mauritius, erasing all mention of the islands. That is actually happening. I have seen some of that documentary proof.

The recognition in the amendment would prevent that erasure. It does not settle the question of sovereignty, prejudge the right of return or determine citizenship policy, but it ensures that the people who lived on these islands for generations, who were removed without consent and who have been fighting to preserve their identity ever since cannot be written out of their own history or out of our legislation.

One native islander wrote:

“We want our name to exist before we die. We want to be seen as the people of our islands, not as shadows erased from paper.”


Another wrote:

“They took our homes. They took our animals. They took our graves. Please, do not let them take our identity in law.”


Another important one says:

“The Minister says we were never a people. I lived my whole childhood on Peros Banhos. My father and mother were born there. How can she say we were not there?”


The world knows that there was a people in the Chagos Islands. The archives know, the courts know, the UN knows, the historians know and the survivors who still bear witness know. Only this Bill seems to pretend otherwise. I believe that recognition is the minimum moral duty owed to a people who were removed from their homeland, denied their rights and then told that their existence did not matter.

The amendment affirms that they did exist, they do exist and they will continue to exist in the law of this country. I know that a group of Chagossians have written to the Minister in the last few days questioning why she made such a statement. I hope that she will be able to give them some support tonight and say that she recognises their existence and that they should be recognised in the law of the United Kingdom. The amendment does not affect anything to do with security, which seems to be and rightly, perhaps, is the real reason for what the Government are doing. This does not affect one single bit of anything to do with the security of the Chagos Islands, so I hope that the Minister will go back and accept the amendment on Report.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, Amendment 81 in my name is in some key senses the most important of all the amendments that I have tabled in Committee. The purpose of Amendment 81 is to probe the question of what will happen to the Chagossian people if the Bill receives Royal Assent and the Mauritius treaty comes into force. The logic that underpins the Government’s position is that Chagossians are, from the civic perspective—the perspective of their citizenship—Mauritian.

Of course, this will not change their ethnicity, but it will extinguish a critical dimension of their identity, which, while in a very real sense it was suspended as a result of the gross injustices that were committed against them in 1968 and 1973, has not been extinguished. Although the splitting of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in 1965 was imposed on the Chagossians, it bestowed on them a civic identity apart from Mauritius that they were pleased to receive and enjoyed while living on their islands from 1965 until their forced expulsion.

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The issue about identity that she raises matters. Recognition in official documents matters to people. It is identity. I can see why it matters. Decisions on that do not have any bearing on our ability to operate the base securely. I was hoping that the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, would be in her place. I want to make clear to the Committee and place on record that the Mauritian Government have now said that they will record the place of birth as “Islands of the Chagos Archipelago” and that, where this has not happened, they will review and amend any documents as necessary.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

Will the Minister just give me a short, simple answer to why the United Kingdom Government will not recognise the Chagossian people as an indigenous people?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

The legal situation is as I have described. The noble Baroness may wish that that were not the case, but the legal position is as it is, and the Government do not intend to amend the Bill in order to change that legal position.

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Moved by

[Baroness Hoey]

47: After Clause 4, insert the following new Clause—
“Demographic study of the Chagossian peopleThe Secretary of State must produce a report projecting the population growth of the Chagossian people over the next 30 years, including their global diaspora, and the impact of this Act upon that projected growth, and assess the implications for international recognition of their national identity.”

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as some comments were made on the previous day in Committee about how few Members there were on the Government Benches, I thought it might be nice to say how pleased I am to see so many tonight. I am sorry that the Lib Dems still have not produced many people, but anyway: it is very nice to see so many people.

Amendment 47 is a stand-alone amendment, which again does not really affect the security aspects of Diego Garcia or the treaty in the sense of changing it hugely. It asks the Secretary of State to

“produce a report projecting the population growth of the Chagossian people over the next 30 years, including their global diaspora, and the impact of this Act upon that projected growth, and assess the implications for international recognition of their national identity”.

One of the Government’s recent arguments for the treaty and the Bill is that the Americans want it. They have explained that the United States is troubled about having a military base on an island with contested sovereignty, and that it has said that until matters are resolved and there is legal certainty, it will not invest in the base. That is probably précising the argument. The Government argue that the treaty and the Bill will deliver the requisite legal certainty. The argument is based on the assumption, if this Bill becomes an Act and the Mauritius treaty can then be ratified, that all the legal uncertainties will be put to bed.

It is my contention in moving Amendment 47 that if this Act passes and the Mauritius treaty is ratified—two things I very much hope will still not happen—all that will happen is that one legal uncertainty will be replaced by another, and the Americans will have made no progress towards getting that certainty. Instead of the uncertainty arising from the Republic of Mauritius contesting United Kingdom sovereignty over the islands, we will be presented with the uncertainty that arises from the Chagossian people contesting the Republic of Mauritius’s sovereignty. I get the sense that, in removing the basis for Chagossians living in the United Kingdom to continue to enjoy British Overseas Territory citizenship after the passage of this Act, there is a desire to try to collapse Chagossian civic identity into British civic identity, to the extent that Chagossians reside in the UK, so that distinctive Chagossian civic identity disappears.

The truth, however, is that the identity of the Chagossian community in exile will not go away, resting as it does principally across three states: the United Kingdom, Mauritius and the Seychelles. The number of Chagossians is increasing and they are becoming more animated in their commitment to securing self-determination as a people defined, even in exile, by their relationship to their islands.

There is a sense that, until this point, the impact of the Chagossian identity in international relations has been somewhat muted, in that their desire is not to be returned to their islands to become a sovereign, independent state. The Chagossians who issued the statement of self-determination, who have written to us and whom we have met, were very clear on this point. Since they see themselves as connected to the UK, there has never been a need hitherto for them to assert their identity and seek international personality to claim the islands. This will change completely if the islands are transferred to the Republic of Mauritius. Even while the United Kingdom has shamefully failed to resettle the islands, they have remained under British sovereignty, which over 99% of well over 3,000 Chagossians are recorded as saying that they want. Obviously, they do not want things as they are at present, but to be resettled.

In this context, the contention of my amendment is that the Government and the United States of America need to think carefully about what is likely to happen to the Chagossians as a people in exile. I believe that, rather than allowing themselves to be absorbed into other countries, they will continue increasing in number and adopting an ever-stronger and more resilient identity, and that in times to come we will look back on this Bill and this treaty, if it goes through, as something that has made even more uncertainty over Diego Garcia. I beg to move.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey. It would be interesting not only to look at the future projections of the population of Chagossians but to have a proper, full-on demographic study of this unique people. We heard it asserted again by the Minister, in a very embarrassed and regretful tone, that there was no population and the people do not really exist, “This may not be my view but it is the view of the courts”, and so on. It is worth spending a moment reminding ourselves of who these people are, some of whom—to remind noble Lords opposite who have just turned up—are observing this debate.

There was a unique inheritance in the Chagos Archipelago. The population came from both directions: largely from Africa—from Madagascar, which has its own unique demographics, east Africa and Mozambique—as indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent, from Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Bengal and Ceylon to some degree, and a little bit from France. This is reflected in a unique linguistic tradition. I have listened, over many years representing the part of Sussex where most British Chagossians live, to the Bourbonnais Creole. There is a kind of French spoken throughout the Indian Ocean, in the Seychelles and in Mauritius, but Chagossian French is clearly distinct. It is not simply a dialect of Mauritian French. There are very different words. For example, a boat is a “pirog” rather than a “bato”, and a net is a “lagoni” rather than a “rezou”. My apologies to any watching Chagossians for my pronunciation. There is a unique and distinctive oral tradition, rich in nautical metaphors and especially in longing, melancholy and a sense of exile.

In the grey and unpromising streets of Crawley—I mean no disrespect to Crawley, which is part of my old patch—people have worked to keep alive these old folkways and traditions. They are focused on the sense of longing and return. There are ritual incantations that mention the villages now lost. There are special celebrations and meals marking what was taken away. A sense of exile can become a central part of your identity as a people. We have seen it happen many times. I invite noble Lords to recall the words of Psalm 137:

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget her cunning …let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, If I remember thee not”.


With every passing year, it becomes a stronger part of your identity as a people.

All this is by way of saying that the idea that once this treaty is signed and a couple of signatures are exchanged, the people of Chagos will forget their identity, blend happily into the Mauritian population and become just one more exiled group with no more prospect of returning home is an utter fantasy. We will have replaced a legalistic dispute with a much more visceral one, which will carry on for as long as there are people who still remember the noise of the surf and swell of the archipelago. Those people will press every future Government for their right to return not as Mauritian citizens but as what they are asking for now, Chagossians under British sovereignty. Eventually, they will get a Government who honour their wish.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I have said repeatedly throughout these deliberations that the Government are very interested in thinking about different ways of working alongside the Chagossian community on these issues. That applies to Amendment 47 as well.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, asks the Government in her amendment to produce a report consisting of a demographic study of the Chagossian community. I am going to have to disappoint her this evening. It will not be possible to produce a useful report, at a cost to taxpayers, in time for it to do anything of consequence alongside this treaty. It is not a bad idea to have a report such as this, for many of the reasons that have been described. I would not be against it. What I am saying is that the responsibility for conducting the study does not belong in this Bill, but that does not mean it is a bad thing to do in principle. The noble Baroness will know, as we have heard most recently from the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, about the IDRC leading a report into the Chagossians, which I hope will be published soon. I hope that all these things will help to mitigate some of the noble Baroness’s concerns.

I saw that Jeremy Corbyn had also written to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, wo chairs the IRDC, which is responsible for the survey. It is not something that the Government are responsible for. We are looking forward to the results. We were asked what weight we put on the survey. It is for the committee to determine that. I am sure that it will take on board the comments that have been made by those who are concerned about how the survey has been conducted. I know that some Chagossians would be completely unable to access a survey such as this, for reasons of literacy or access to the means by which the survey is being conducted. I am sure that the committee will want to reflect on that. We certainly will when we receive its report. I look forward to it and hope that it is useful in assisting us to understand the complexity of opinion that exists within Chagossian communities.

On the substantive point that the noble Baroness raises, such a piece of work may well be useful, but I am not able this evening to commit the Government to commissioning it. With that, I hope that noble Lords will not press their amendments.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that rather thoughtful answer. I note that she did not rule out what I said—that the Americans would still be seeing uncertainty in the future. I think that we will see that whatever happens in this Bill. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 47 withdrawn.