Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Morrow Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

That was my understanding, but even that was too much for me. Even if we had been able to get continued sovereignty on the base and some kind of shared sovereignty on the outer atolls, that would still have been exchanging a freehold for a leasehold. It is a preposterous thing to do when we are being told to do it by a court that has expressly been denied jurisdiction in cases between Commonwealth states. We would be doing it, setting a terrible precedent, to satisfy a tribunal that has no authority.

I was very critical of the previous Government for countenancing these changes. I have told the people involved what I think of it. I am equally critical of this Government, as I suspect are quite a lot of the people on the Labour Benches. I look at the expressions of some noble Lords opposite. I know they are decent patriots and democrats, and I know they feel a sense of obligation to our dispossessed Chagossian colleagues. Of course, they have to do their duty, such is the essence of politics.

I finish by holding out the prospect—just the vision—of people coming back: of civilian and military life coming back; of stories told again by grandmothers under newly thatched roofs, their voices stitched with salt and memory; of footsteps remembering the pale coral paths; and of the islands themselves remembering their old inhabitants, as the tides remember the moon.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 31 standing in my name. I want to place on record my appreciation for the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, stepping in last week during the difficult situation I had back home. It again demonstrates clearly that, when you throw an awkward ball to a good player, he will pick it up, make you look good and carry on as if nothing has happened, but I appreciate his assistance in that instance.

I was about to say three lines on this amendment, but then I thought I was perhaps being too presumptuous, because I hoped that the Government, just by reading the amendment, would simply have said that there was no reason why they could not support it. I hope that that is exactly what they will say at the end of the debate, but I think I had better say more than just one or two lines in relation to it before sitting down.

Even if one accepted that it was just £101 million every year for 99 years and considered the proposition in its own terms, without regard for the preceding history, the contrast between this and a one-off payment of £40 million to the Chagossians conveys the message that, while the Mauritians are important and worthy of respect, the Chagossians are, by contrast, worthy only of a few crumbs from the table, relatively speaking, which is deeply hurtful and insulting.

Secondly, to really understand the injustice presented by the arrangement, it obviously needs to be seen in the context of history. The Chagossians do not, for the most part, regard themselves as Mauritian.

I have heard what the noble Lords, Lord Weir and Lord Jay, have said. As the noble Lord, Lord Weir, rightly said, across the United Kingdom there is a multiplicity of views on many issues, so it is difficult to get a concise, exact and single supporting view on this, but I will say these things anyway. In this context, the decision to also pay Mauritius a fantastically large sum of money for the use of just one of the Chagos Islands, while the Chagossians are afforded just £40 million, compounds the present injustice.

To appreciate the menacing nature of the way this monetary injustice greatly compounds the underlying injustice, one must point out that the monies for resettlement set out in the KPMG report are significantly less than the monies it is now proposed the Republic of Mauritius be paid for the UK to lease just one of the Chagos Islands.

Finally, the funding for the Chagossians is also important. Article 11 of the treaty undermines the UK Government’s argument for it by addressing the Chagossians apart from the Mauritians. They are, in effect, saying that it is right to return the islands to the Republic of Mauritius because the pre-8 November 1965 boundaries of the colony express the self-determination of the people of the territory, which implies that everyone, at least from a civic perspective, can be happily Mauritian. However, in that context, there would be no need to address the Chagossians separately and allocate payment to them. In addressing the Chagossians separately, the treaty, in effect, hoists itself with its own petard.

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in my name in this group, and I support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Hannan, who masterfully adumbrated his litany of development ideas, as well as those in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, the noble Lords, Lord Weir and Lord Callanan, and others.

The theme before the Committee in this group has surely been, as the noble Lord, Lord Weir, put it, an attempt to understand the views, wishes, legitimate desires and concerns of Chagossians. How is it possible to do so without a proper process for consultation with the Chagossian community? Much has already been said in the Committee about the inadequacy of the consultation process followed by the Government that has brought us to this point in the design of the Bill and their policy. My Amendment 81C would make the Chagossian contact group, the Government’s official consultation forum, more robust. Indeed, it would ensure that the Chagossian contact group remained in existence throughout the lifetime of the treaty.

In all the impenetrable fora, groups and organisations within Whitehall, the Chagossian contact group has been shrouded, I think it is fair to say, in a little secrecy. I have repeatedly asked Written Questions of Ministers about the operation of this consultation mechanism. We know that it met earlier this year and was attended by a Minister and that it is chaired by a deputy director in the FCDO and has a small secretariat. My amendment would ensure that it remained active and that Chagossians continued to be enfranchised to a greater extent than they have been thus far by the Government.

My Amendment 81G pertains to the theme of resettlement, which has already been mentioned extensively in the debate. The Government prayed in aid the notion of resettlement as one of their key motives for pursuing this policy, and they have taken the word of the Mauritian Government, I think it is fair to say, on trust when it comes to resettlement. To a certain extent, that is to be expected at international negotiations and in bilateral fora, but there is no reason why the Government should not take steps to ensure that the important issue of resettlement is continually checked on by Ministers in future. That is why, in Amendment 81G, I suggest that within 12 months of Royal Assent the Secretary of State should publish a report made in connection with Article 6 of the treaty as to progress on resettlement.

For the sake of timing, I shall speak also to my Amendment 20C, which is grouped here, on the marine protected area. With this amendment, I seek to ensure that the Government take external expertise and consultation of the kind that the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, mentioned, from universities and scientific experts, who have deep concerns about the potential administration of the marine protected area by the Mauritian authorities and the standards to which those authorities will hold the administration of the MPA and its future designations—whether they will truly be in accordance with the standards that have thus far been set by the UK Government, in terms of both environmental protection and the quality of expertise, scientific and otherwise, used in governing those important regions for marine and broader conservation. My Amendment 20C seeks to ensure that an independent panel is commissioned before those elements of the treaty come into force to provide a serious and well-thought-out independent view, away from the scientific advice that the UK Government will take from their own resources, and to publish that advice so that the international community can see that the Mauritian Government will be held to those international standards.

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[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, following on from the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, surely the fundamental difference with the two bases on Cyprus that he mentioned is that we kept them in perpetuity—they are sovereign bases. Yes, we have an arrangement with the Cypriot Government to inform them of activity after deployment takes place, but what concerns me about this particular lease arrangement is very simple.

At the moment, we have in place a Government in Mauritius headed by His Excellency Navin Ramgoolam, who is a democrat and a friend of his country. I had the privilege of meeting him a number of times when he was premier before. Indeed, he took over from a Government who were also democratic and had all the right intents. We had many arguments about this issue but, fundamentally, we were two democratic Governments discussing a matter.

The concern I have is this: what would happen if there were some sort of coup or a military Government in Mauritius? In these worst-case scenarios, we have to be prepared for the future. Let us hope for the best but prepare for the very worst. Could the Minister comment on what would happen to these arrangements in the treaty in that event? If, indeed, a military coup took place and an alliance was made with a hostile power, the operations of this base could be jeopardised.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendments 20G and 20H in my name. I have tabled them because I want to probe more deeply whether the consequences of non-ratification are such that non-ratification is not an option.

Furthermore, it is important that we are clear about what we can and cannot do. The Minister has told the Committee that the treaty is a done deal; that it cannot be changed; and that the role of your Lordships’ House in relation to it and to the Bill before us today is really very limited. The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, has supported the Government in this view, suggesting that, going forward, there is only scope for possibly impacting the details of the implementation. It is clear that, although the CRaG process did not prevent the Government ratifying the treaty, the treaty was defined between the UK Government and the Republic of Mauritius in terms that place not only a clear distinction between the act of signing and ratification but unusual distance between the two, in that the treaty cannot come into focus unless and until the Bill before us today is passed and Clause 2 transfers sovereignty.

The comments of the noble Lord, Lord Murray, on day one in Committee were important. He said:

“Because of the way the treaty is drafted and the way Article 18 operates, the treaty can come into force only when this legislation is implemented. That is unusual”.


After an exchange, the Minister helpfully clarified the situation further and said:

“Before the UK can ratify the treaty, we will need to do the following: pass both primary and secondary legislation, update the UK-US exchange of notes, and put in place agreements on the environment, maritime security and migration”.—[Official Report, 18/11/25; col. 713.]


In this context, it is clear that, although the treaty has been negotiated and cannot be changed without reopening negotiations, it has been defined in terms to which both parties consented. This means that what could be drawn from the act of signature on 22 May was, by definition, inherently provisional and contingent. It was signed subject to recognition that the act of signing did not bring the treaty into force; and that the treaty would not come into force unless and until the respective political processes of both countries had been properly honoured. In this context, because the coming into force of the treaty depends on an Act of Parliament, this is plainly not a done deal, in my estimation.

Furthermore, as a legislature on its toes, we have to let the Executive know that we understand that, having negotiated the treaty, they will encourage us to pass this legislation so that it can move to ratification. We know that this does not mean that we have to pass this piece of legislation any more than we have to pass any other piece of legislation. If we reject this Bill, the islands could not be given to Mauritius. If the Government chose, they could then invoke the Parliament Act, which would delay things by some 13 months or thereabouts, in the context of which there is a good chance that common sense would prevail. The Republic of Mauritius could not object to this because it signed up to the treaty knowing that it depended on domestic processes that, in this case, require the passing of legislation through a legislature that cannot be dictated to by the Executive. It is really important that we are open, transparent and honest about the opportunity that we have both to stand up for the Chagossians and to say no to this treaty because, if we have the power to do so, we have the responsibility to do so. That is, I think, is of equal importance; it may even be more important.

Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Morrow Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Morrow]

20J: Clause 1, page 1, line 7, at end insert “, subject to subsection (2A).
(2A) Sections 2 to 4 do not come into force until the Secretary of State has produced a report setting out any reasons for rejecting any remedies otherwise than this Treaty for resolving challenges to the United Kingdom’s sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago.”

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, Amendment 20J in my name proposes that Clauses 2 to 4 do not come into force until the Secretary of State has produced a report setting out the reasons for rejecting the alternative legal remedies to those set out in the Mauritius treaty for resolving challenges to the United Kingdom’s sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago.

At the heart of the Government’s justification for proceeding with the Bill to bring the Mauritius treaty into force is the non-binding judgment of the International Court of Justice from 2019. The Government have, I think, acknowledged that it is not binding but have sought to ensure that, if it is ignored, binding judgments will quickly arise and other countries upon which we depend to run the base would then refuse to help. The Government have not clearly explained what these feared judgments are and why they would be binding. I invite the Minister to do so in detail and to tell the Committee which countries we depend on to run the islands, which we think would then refuse key services and what those services are.

However, in this amendment, I want to probe a different approach. The Government tell us that this is a critical Bill because its passage will facilitate the coming into force of the Mauritius treaty. The treaty is vital because the United States has told the UK Government that it is unhappy about having a major US base on Diego Garcia when the sovereignty of Garcia is contested. Furthermore, it has paused investment on Diego Garcia, which will not recommence until the legal standing of the Chagos Islands has been resolved.

It is crucial that this matter is resolved, because the security—not just of the United States but of the United Kingdom and the West—depends on full US investment in Diego Garcia. In this context, the reason why the Bill and the treaty, which will come into force if it becomes an Act of Parliament, are vital is because they set out the only route to legal certainty for the standing of the US military base. However, this solution does not provide the only way forward to secure legal certainty, and there are alternative ways forward that would better secure legal certainty than the Bill and the treaty. It is the purpose of my amendment to ask the Government to consider these alternatives.

The problem with the Government’s approach in claiming that the treaty constitutes the only legal way forward is that it is the product of a non-binding legal judgment that was a response to the disagreement between two parties—the Republic of Mauritius and the United Kingdom. The Chagossians were not a party to the case because at that time they did not have international personality. Had they been a party then, the judgment would have dealt with a wider range of issues and considered a wider range of ways forward.

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[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)]

In relation to Amendment 20J, the House has dedicated at least 15 hours to debating the Government’s rationale for entering this treaty. It has been subject to two reports, by the International Agreements Committee and the International Relations and Defence Committee. Three separate committees—the IAC, the IRDC and the Foreign Affairs Committee—have held evidence sessions and questioned the Minister for the Overseas Territories.

The Government have been consistently clear throughout. The legal case was compelling and there was no credible alternative. A policy of hanging tough, which I assume the noble Lord has in mind, would have been a real gift to our adversaries. As we have stated on numerous occasions, the continued operation of the base was under threat. Courts were already making decisions which undermined our position. If a long-term deal had not been reached, further wide-ranging litigation was likely, with no realistic prospect of the UK successfully defending its legal position on sovereignty in such cases.

Legally binding provisional measures from the courts could have come within weeks, affecting, for example, our ability to patrol the waters around Diego Garcia. Both the IRDC and the IAC recognise that the treaty provides legal certainty for the base. I hope the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have spoken in this debate. I have noticed that no one has spoken against the amendment, other than the Minister who brought her explanation and reason. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 20J withdrawn.

Moved by

[Lord Morrow]

20K: Clause 1, page 1, line 7, at end insert “, subject to subsection (2A).
(2A) Sections 2 to 4 do not come into force until the Secretary of State has produced a report assessing the ability of the Government of Mauritius to govern the Chagos Archipelago under the terms of the Treaty and the implications for international peace and stability of transferring sovereignty.”

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, there has been lot of talk about the rules-based international order in recent years, largely in response to the concern that the reality to which it testifies looks considerably less certain in the context of the development of what some scholars are now calling Cold War II. The truth, however, is that international relations has never been a strictly rule-based order, in the sense that it has approximated life in the domestic context. On the other hand, informed by social conventions that testify to the common humanity of all the people of the earth, international relations has never approximated to international anarchy. There have always been rules, and yet they have been different from the domestic sense because of the absence of a world state with all the sanctions of domestic government.

In this context, those rules have to accommodate considerations of power in a way that we do not see domestically. Sound thinking about international relations has never been just about rules abstracted from considerations of power any more than it has been about power abstracted from rules.

We can get into real difficulty if we lose sight of questions of power. One critical way in which international relations has conventionally had regard for questions of power arises from the point at which a new sovereign state, whether arising from the break-up of an existing state, decolonisation, or some other kind of reconfiguration of territorial integrity, is recognised by other sovereign states. This act of recognition conveys on the state sovereignty as the international personality. It involves those states saying that they recognise the right of the other state to exist, with its territorial integrity, and the right of that state to make the laws to which it is subject in relation to that territorial integrity.

This process is mutual in the sense that if state A will not recognise state B, then state B usually will not recognise state A until state A recognises it. One of the critical questions facing a sovereign state in determining whether it recognises another state is whether it recognises its full territorial integrity and right to make the laws of that territorial integrity, together with an assessment of its physical capacity to govern that territorial integrity.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I suggest that the noble Lord looks at the ways in which marine protected areas are generally enforced. It is not, as he seems to imagine, by patrolling in vessels around the ocean, checking on things. That is not how these things work. But I will gladly send him some information about that.

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, for their contributions. Having listened to the Minister, I am wondering whether she will get time to reflect on this debate and on what has been asked and what has been said. Perhaps, if she does, she will write to us and put her reply in the Library, for the availability of every Peer in this House. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 20K withdrawn.

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[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.