Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Earl of Leicester Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

That legal position is guidance; it is not law.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

There have been legal judgments in English courts and elsewhere that have established that the right that the noble Baroness’s amendment seeks to grant to the Chagossian people does not currently exist in law. It is not guidance. Those are decisions of English courts. I hope that, with that, the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 20T and 81K. Amendment 20T just requires that Amendment 81K would happen before the treaty, or parts of it, comes into force.

Amendment 81K proposes setting up a parliamentary commission between the United Kingdom and Mauritius. The proposal is that we seek to agree with Mauritius that this parliamentary commission should reflect equal representation from the Parliaments of the United Kingdom—this Parliament—and the Republic of Mauritius, which one hopes would be acceptable to the Mauritians as fairly rational in these circumstances. More important, what is the function of this commission? It should be to ensure,

“the recognition and protection of Chagossian rights, including but not limited to … ensuring a right of return … ensuring the right to self-determination via a referendum of all Chagossians on the question of sovereignty is held by the UK”,

and

“access to compensation, resettlement, or other forms of support”.

The Minister has repeated again today this extraordinary affirmation that there is no Chagossian people and never has been—that there has never been any permanent population of the Chagos Islands. I can see why the Minister can say that there no longer is, because we shamefully removed them. But to rely on the fact that we removed them and therefore they are not permanent, when all of us now think it was monstrous that this was done with no possibility of return at the time, and that we should be setting this right, now that we are trying to sort the aftermath of decolonisation, as it is seen, is to my mind extraordinary. How can there have been no permanent population in the past if there are churches, graveyards, signs of habitation, work, agriculture and fishing on several of the islands? Above all, how can we pretend that there never has been any Chagossian population and, at the same time, grant British citizenship to those who can demonstrate that they are descended from Chagossians?

The Minister cannot have it both ways. She cannot say that there has never been anyone there and that we are now recognising that those who have been there, or are descended from them, have the right to British citizenship. It is there in the treaty. I know that when she mentioned this she said it with obvious distaste and embarrassment, but that distaste and embarrassment should have been sorted out with her officials before she got round to saying it again in this Chamber. It is very insulting to the Chagossian people to say that they have never existed.

Given that the Chagossian people have existed, and that we recognise that it was wrong to remove them without in any way trying to provide them with some prospect of undoing that wrong, surely we should, through the parliamentary commission that I propose in this amendment, discuss with the Mauritians, if sovereignty is handed over to them, at least giving Chagossians the right of return and the right of self-determination via a referendum, along with access to compensation, resettlement or other forms of support. If we do that then at least we will go a small way to undoing the wrong that was done in the late 1960s—I think it extended into the 1970s—which all of us now recognise.

It is clearly important that we have some kind of parliamentary commission overseeing this, because the treaty does not do these things. It could allow the resettlement to be extended to Mauritians and not be given to Chagossians, and it could result in the fund that we set up not being paid out to Chagossians—certainly not to Chagossians who have been in the United Kingdom, but solely to Chagossians who now live in Mauritius. It is only right and proper that we have some parliamentary oversight from both sides—from Mauritius as well as from the UK—to ensure this is all properly done. I am sure this proposition is so reasonable that such a reasonable Minister as we have on the Front Bench cannot fail to agree with it. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

I want to add to my noble friend’s words. I will not read the whole letter, but this is a copy of the letter to the Minister from the Chagossian people. They write that the Minister’s words

“cut deeply. They erase our history, our dignity, and the truth of who we are. They echo the very language used to justify our people’s deportation between 1968 and 1973. And they are demonstrably false … For more than a century before our exile, the Chagos Islands were home to a multigenerational, settled population. This is not our opinion. It is documented in church registers of births, marriages, and burials across Peros Banhos, Salomon and Diego Garcia; colonial-era records describing communities with homes, chapels, gardens and workplaces; judgments of the UK High Court in the Bancoult cases; the International Court of Justice; United Nations resolutions; academic research stretching across decades. We were not transient workers. We were a Creole-speaking people, rooted in our islands, with our own traditions, our own culture, and our own community life. To say that our homeland had ‘no permanent population’ is simply untrue … You also stated the islands had ‘never been self-governing’. Chagossians have never claimed to have operated a Westminster-style system. But for generations, in the long absence of resident British administrators, our islands were organised and cared for by local leaders from within our own community”.

This has been confirmed in academic work. Misley Mandarin, who lives here in London now with his family, finishes,

“We ask you not for sympathy, but for recognition. Not for pity, but for accuracy. Not for charity, but for truth. We deserve self-determination. We want to stay British and return to our islands as British citizens”.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 20T and 81K, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lilley, seek to achieve a similar objective to Amendments 80 and 82. Given the similarity of the two pairs of amendments, I was slightly surprised to see the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, degroup his amendments. We could have had a very satisfactory debate with the original grouping, but of course I fully respect the noble Lord’s right to degroup his amendments. I am slightly surprised, because he criticised me for doing something similar last week, but it is, of course, only right that noble Lords should be able to debate their amendments in the groupings that most suit them.

I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Lilley has the right to self-determination, as confirmed by a referendum of the Chagossians, in his amendment. This is an important point that I am sure many noble Lords will agree with.

Amendment 20T would also delay the implementation of the key parts of this Bill until some progress has been made on establishing the joint parliamentary commission. It seems to me that too many core parts of the treaty are not tied to deadlines or quantifiable outcomes. As a result, it would be hard to monitor whether Mauritius, and indeed the UK, are fulfilling their obligations under the treaty in a timely manner. My noble friend Lord Lilley’s amendment helpfully ties the joint parliamentary commission to the coming into effect of the Act, forcing Ministers and their Mauritian counterparts to get on with the job so that the commission can play an important role from the very beginning of the treaty’s effect. It is a very sensible proposal.

I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on whether the Government will agree that establishing a joint parliamentary commission would be a useful tool going forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[The Earl of Leicester (Con)]

My Lords, in this amendment, we are talking about a democratic study of the Chagossian people. However, I want to speak about a matter that has been mentioned briefly by my noble friend Lord Callanan and that goes to the very heart of democratic integrity and the dignity of an entire people.

I wish to address a survey issued by the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee that aims to capture

“Chagossian views on the Agreement with Mauritius concerning the Chagos Archipelago”.

This survey cannot be relied on. It is methodologically flawed, structurally careless, open to manipulation and in several aspects dangerously misleading. The Chagossian people, who have endured decades of dispossession, displacement and injustice, deserve far better than an instrument that falls short at every level.

First, on the technical design, the survey is hosted on Microsoft Forms, a rudimentary platform that any undergraduate research supervisor would reject for a project involving even minimal verification. There are no safeguards against duplicate submissions, no protection against cyber manipulation, no identity checks and no mechanism whatever to confirm whether a respondent is actually Chagossian. For a survey that concerns sovereignty, citizenship, resettlement and the legacy of one of the gravest forced removals in modern British history, this is astonishing. It leaves the process exposed to interference by anyone, anywhere, with any motive.

Unfortunately, that is not a theoretical risk. The survey still has a week to run, and we already have deeply troubling reports from Mauritius. There are claims, supported by video evidence which I have seen and direct testimonials, that Mauritian officials and intermediaries have been filling out the survey on behalf of Chagossians who cannot read English, cannot understand the political implications and cannot write their own responses.

Even more seriously, multiple Chagossians have told us that they oppose the agreement with Mauritius yet believe that they have been marked down as supporting it in this survey. If this is true, then a foreign Government are, in effect, interfering with a House of Lords committee’s evidence-gathering process. Not only does this compromise the validity of the survey but it threatens the independence and integrity of Parliament itself. Let us be absolutely clear: this is not a consultation but contamination.

Let me take your Lordships through some of the survey questions. It begins with text that states that:

“A new law implementing the Agreement is currently being debated … and members of the House of Lords want to hear … opinions … before voting on it”.


What it does not say—and very much ought to—is that this agreement is not yet in force, that ratification is required and that Parliament can still reject it. The omission is misleading and may lead many to believe the treaty is inevitable. When you are asking a displaced people about the fate of their homeland, clarity is not optional; it is essential.

The survey repeatedly instructs respondents not to provide any identifying information. At the same time, it allows anyone in the world to submit answers as many times as they like, with no checks. There is no way to confirm whether responses come from Chagossians, non-Chagossians, organised political activists or even automated submissions. I have personally seen a text message from a high-ranking Mauritius official stating:

“My guys in the Mauritian Government are”—


I will change the wording—very worried.

“They are planning for civil unrest when they cancel the tax cuts”.

It is clear what the Mauritians want. For a consultation that claims to express Chagossian views, this alone renders the entire exercise invalid.