Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, I regret that I missed the opportunity to add my name in support of Amendment 32 from the noble Baroness. It is remarkable and significant that there is sufficient interest in the Chagossian community, after so many years since they and their forebears were evicted, to form with due process a Government in exile. I have already exchanged emails with the nominated First Minister, Mr Misley Mandarin.

The Minister was perhaps too optimistically dismissive in Committee when she suggested that there was insufficient Chagossian presence on the atoll to form or justify an independent authority. There is none there; they were evicted in the 1970s. There is also the recent finding of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to consider. Have the Government considered whether this might influence the thinking and advisory findings of the international court, which triggered this Government’s search for a long-term arrangement for Diego Garcia as a military base?

I note that the other far neighbour of the Chagos Archipelago, the Maldives, has raised seemingly legitimate human rights concerns about the Government’s methods of rushing these matters through this House. The number of amendments on Report is a reasonable measure of the many concerns held in this House. Though the treaty has been agreed, I urge the Government to proceed at a measured pace to allow these many concerns to be properly and fully considered. Will they reassure the House that there is no set time limit for these national procedures to be considered, as, if they were to be conceded, it might invalidate the treaty as signed on 22 May 2025?

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, before I speak to my Amendments 33A and 18, I totally support the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, in her Amendment 32 and hope that noble Lords will accept that it is a really sensible way forward. So much has happened even since we started talking about this issue a while ago. We have heard about the committee report. I thank the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, for a very good report which ends up saying what many of us thought: obviously we cannot say it of every single Chagossian but, overall, they feel that they want to stay part of a British island archipelago. We would not be here if there had been no forced removal originally and the people of the Chagos Islands had been afforded a self-determination referendum back in 1965, as the Ellice Islands were prior to their detachment from the Gilbert Islands.

The report of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is new. I do not understand why the Government are pushing this so quickly. Why is it being rushed through? Why are we having Report and Third Reading all in the same week, when there is so much controversy over this issue? It seems very strange.

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We need to be very clear that this treaty provides the only viable path to resettlement on the archipelago. Successive British Governments have never been prepared to do this and those who seek to stymie the passage of this Bill offer no viable alternative, thereby doing a disservice to all those Chagossians who want to see the possibility of resettlement become a reality.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

Before the Minister sits down, could she tell us whether our very distinguished Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, had given any advice—admittedly, she cannot tell us what advice—to the Government on the report of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which has come out so strongly against what His Majesty’s Government are doing on the Chagos Islands?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Not that I am aware of. I point out that the committee to which the noble Baroness and others have referred is not a legal body of the UN; it does not speak for the UN or for any UN member states. It is important for noble Lords to be aware of that, so that they are not labouring under a misapprehension.

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[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment seeks to require the Government to publish a statement stating that they are satisfied that the state of Mauritius is not unduly influenced by hostile state actors and that those actors will not interfere with the operation of the military base. In our increasingly unstable world, where hostile actors are using increasingly unconventional measures to interfere with our activities both at home and abroad, we must be alive to the risks posed by those states.

China’s ambassador to Mauritius has applauded the treaty, and Mauritius has recently released public statements in support of China’s “One China” policy. So could the Minister set out what steps were taken by Ministers and officials to assess the impact of the treaty on the influence that hostile countries will be able to have on the Mauritian Government and the military base? Were any concerns raised with Ministers about the influence of hostile state actors during the negotiations, and have any concerns been raised since?

My Amendment 44 focuses on the notification of the Mauritian Government. I was pleased that we were able to clarify in Committee that the Mauritian Government will not in fact receive prior notice of operations launched from Diego Garcia. Could the Minister go further and confirm that they will not receive prior notification of any other activities at the base, such as maintenance, upgrades, visits by foreign forces and so on? I would be grateful if the Minister could take the opportunity to provide a little more clarity on these points today.

On the wider issue of long-term security, the question we must ask ourselves is: does the Bill actually preserve our long-term security or does it make that security even more uncertain? For example, we have profound concerns about the relationship between Mauritius and China. It is clearly worrying that China’s representatives in Mauritius applauded this deal.

The concerns raised by my noble friend Lord Lilley around the Pelindaba treaty, to which the Mauritian Government is a signatory, have also not been satisfactorily answered by Ministers. The Minister was very cautious, perhaps understandably so, in the language he used in Committee, but we welcome his assurance that the Diego Garcia military base will continue to operate as it does now under the new treaty. However, that does not explain how Mauritius could fulfil its obligations under the Pelindaba treaty.

I do not want to push the Minister any further to put sensitive information in the public domain, but any way in which he can go further to reassure us that the operational capacities of the base will remain completely unchanged under the treaty would be welcomed by the House—particularly by noble Lords on this side.

I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for her amendment. It raises the valid question of the UK’s ability to shape developments on the Chagos Islands beyond Diego Garcia where those activities have defence and security implications. This is an important question, and I hope that the Minister can address it in his reply. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will refer briefly to my Amendments 17 and 49. I tabled one of them in Committee and want to probe a little further on some of the questions to which I did not get satisfactory answers.

What can we do, how do we know and what can the Government do if a country leases an island ostensibly for a non-security or defence purpose but then gradually introduces security and defence functions from Mauritius? In other words, what power do we have over what Mauritius does to the islands once we have given up our capacity other than for Diego Garcia?

Turning to the deployment of security and defence personnel on islands on the Chagos Archipelago beyond Diego Garcia, what UK approval is required? I have raised this before, but I want to know the detail. Given the announcement on 12 September that India had paid Mauritius to secure a defence presence on a Chagos island, would the Minister please tell the House today whether the Republic of Mauritius asked the UK Government ahead of doing that deal with India? If they did not bother to ask, this provides a good reason for not ratifying the treaty at this stage. If the Republic of Mauritius sought UK approval and it was given, why did the UK Government agree? Surely it was completely inappropriate for the Republic of Mauritius to enter deals on what will happen to the islands in the future when the UK Parliament had not yet agreed to the transfer of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, as the treaty is still not ratified. Many of us in this place hope that it never will be.

I have no intention of moving my amendments to a vote. I would just welcome the Minister’s response on those two points.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the House for being absent for my amendments in the first group. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hannan for moving them on my behalf with, I am sure, greater elegance than I would have been able to bring. Were I a believer in conspiracy theories, I would imagine that President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer had got together to prevent me from returning to this House, but I am sure that they both have more serious issues, given their lack of popularity in their respective countries, than dealing with me.

My Amendment 14 seeks for the Government to negotiate guarantees from the Government of Mauritius that Mauritius will not enforce its duties under the Pelindaba treaty on the base of Diego Garcia and to ensure that, if it were to do so, the sovereignty of the base would revert to the UK. The Pelindaba treaty seems pretty clear that it excludes the use of any part of any African country. Mauritius counts itself as an African country. When it takes sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, which we count as part of Africa, it will preclude any of those countries from having any nuclear weapons or armaments on that territory. It would therefore be very difficult, on a simple reading of the Pelindaba treaty, for us to use that for our nuclear submarines or for any aircraft carrying nuclear weapons.

The Mauritius treaty, as it is written, says:

“Each party confirms that none of its existing international obligations or arrangements now in force or effect between it and any third party is in conflict with the provisions of this Agreement”.


If that means that the parties to the agreement intend to ignore any other agreements that they have that may conflict with this, that is all right with me, but the trouble is that it then goes on to say,

“nothing in this Agreement shall affect the status of existing international obligations or arrangements except as expressly provided for in this Agreement”.

That would appear to suggest that nothing in this agreement will override the Pelindaba treaty unless it is expressly stated in this agreement. It is not expressly stated.

I have every confidence in the two Ministers’ patriotism and that they would put the defence of this country manifestly above other minor considerations. I am sure that if it was left to them, we could rely on all this, and I could sit down and not pursue the argument further. But we know that this Government say that their highest priority is international law. If they are now saying that they are prepared to ignore legal agreements and enter into agreements with countries expressly on the basis that they ignore international agreements into which they have entered, we are in a difficult position. I notice the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer, is in his place. Perhaps he has come especially to give us assurances that he will not, in this instance, express the supremacy of international law, and that ultimately the sovereignty and independence of this country, its military defence and its alliance with the United States take priority over those matters. Now, if we can have that assurance, that is fine by me.

I appreciate that here we are dealing with very sensitive matters, and I do not expect the Minister to go into fine detail, but I would like the Government to give me greater assurance than I get from reading the treaty that the Pelindaba treaty is not going, at some future stage, to be cited by Mauritius as a reason why we cannot use nuclear-powered vessels or nuclear-equipped weapons, armaments and aircraft from the base. Unless we have that assurance, we must be rather worried.