Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 8 and 9 are in my name. Amendment 8 says that the treaty shall not come into force until a binding case in an international court requires us to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Amendment 9 requires the Government to spell out their legal position on why they believe such a ruling to be possible, let alone likely.

The whole basis of the Government’s case is that

“without this deal … within weeks we could face losing legal rulings, and within just a few years the base would become inoperable”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/25; col. 1284.]

At Second Reading, the possibility of such a ruling was contested not just by me but by several other noble Lords, on the basis that there is no international court which can rule against our sovereignty in this way. Yet Ministers failed to address that issue and those arguments. Even noble Lords who have held the highest office in the FCDO—mandarins of our diplomatic corps who tenaciously defended this deal—failed to answer or address the question of which court could reach a binding judgment against us.

First, everyone acknowledges that the ruling of the International Court of Justice was purely advisory and not binding on us. Secondly, it was based on resolutions of the UN General Assembly which themselves are not legally binding; nor have they ever been endorsed by the Security Council. Thirdly, when Britain signed up to the ICJ, it specifically precluded disputes between the UK and present or past members of the Commonwealth. So the ruling was triply non-binding, and the ECJ cannot rule against us on this in future because it is a dispute with a Commonwealth country.

Ministers have chosen to ignore these arguments and not dispute them, although it is not clear that they were aware of this situation when they plunged into these negotiations. I rather suspect they were not. They have tacitly acknowledged the truth of these arguments by moving on to assert that the tribunal of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea could rule against Britain and in favour of Mauritius on the issue of sovereignty. As the noble Lord, Lord Murray, spelled out in forensic detail, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has no such power. Britain has invoked Article 298 of the convention, which excludes military matters, so it is outside its wherewithal.

Even when the Philippines brought a case about artificial islands built in the South China Sea, ITLOS ruled that it cannot rule on the sovereignty of the area around those artificial islands—that is not within its purview. It can rule whether the islands are artificial or real and therefore have some territorial waters or not, but not whose they are and who they belong to.

We wonder why the Government got into this position. If the court has no power to rule on matters of sovereignty and the UK insists on exercising its rights under Article 298 of the convention, it just cannot do so. The Government’s silence on all these arguments must be deemed tacit acceptance that they are true. If there is some court or some hidden clause in the agreements that none of us knows about which overrides the points I have made, Amendment 9 will be no problem for them because they can implement it. According to them, within weeks, an adverse ruling will occur in a court which is binding on us. Since they have quite a long time before they can complete even these processes, we will get to know the answer to that conclusion. Alternatively, they could accept Amendment 9 and spell out the legal basis on which they believe an international court—which international court, why and on what grounds—could find against us.

If the Government reject this amendment, we will know that they do not even believe their own case. We will be forced to conclude that they are following, wittingly or unwittingly, the long-standing view of the Foreign Office—expressed very eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in the Second Reading debate—that, unless we accept even an advisory ruling, we will not be able to persuade other countries to accept legally binding rulings. That is perhaps how diplomats think, but it ought not to be how this House thinks.

We ought to reject that doctrine and be very cautious about allowing ourselves to be driven along by long-standing arguments of the Foreign Office. Thinking back, it was very keen on us giving up the Falklands to the Argentines, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that it is very keen nowadays on us giving up Chagos to Mauritius. But none of them—and none of the great mandarins who spoke in the debate—spelled out why we are legally obliged to do so. It was all on the basis that the Foreign Office position would be easier to maintain logically and would be more persuasive with Governments that, otherwise, we were recklessly following.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

How far back is the noble Lord going to go in his historic examination of British Governments? Is his position that the British Government should never ever cede sovereignty to any former colony? I am thinking of Australia, South Africa or Canada. How far is he going back in saying that it is absolutely wrong to cede sovereignty?

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

If the noble Lord wants me to go back further, I think it is a shame that we did not follow the advice of Edmund Burke and reach an agreement with the American colonists to give them independence earlier on.

But we are not talking about giving independence to the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands; we are talking about giving the Chagos Islands to a country which has never ruled them and is 2,000 kilometres away. To do that simply on the basis of long-standing Foreign Office doctrine is, surely, unwise. I hope your Lordships’ House will consider seriously these amendments because, if they are passed, we will know once and for all whether the Government have a strong case or not. If they are rejected, we can be certain that they do not have a strong case for giving away these islands.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I am certainly very happy to mention that the noble Lord himself mentioned Sir Christoper Greenwood’s testimony in his speech, but his primary reasoning was that we should accept even purely advisory rulings of foreign courts in order that we be able better to uphold the rules-based international order. I remind him that the chairman of the committee that heard that evidence said in the debate that, although the committee was divided on the evidence it heard, he was inclined to agree with the arguments I had put forward.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 1 by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I take it that he was not entirely serious when he dreamt up this particular innovation, which is right at the start of the Bill, whereby the purpose of the Bill should be presented in the way that the opponents of the Bill would find most attractive. It is a novel constitutional idea. In his reasons for the purposes of the Act, he has included only things that obviously he agrees with, but he has not included, for example, that this will secure the base for the UK and the USA for the next hundred years. There are arguments for and against, as there with any piece of legislation, but to think that you should state at the beginning of a Bill that the purpose of the legislation is what the Opposition would like to see enacted is novel. The only parallel I can think of would be if the sundry privatisation measures that were passed by the Thatcher Government had said, “The purpose of this Act is to sell off at knock-down prices the assets of the British people”. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, would have been in favour of that kind of constraint when that legislation was going through. I do not take this as a serious amendment, and I am sure he will not press it to a vote—it might be fun if he did, but we will see anyway.

One part of the noble Lord’s proposed new clause that is contentious—well, a lot of it is contentious—on which I would certainly like to hear more from my noble friends on the Front Bench is paragraph (d), which suggests that the Bill will

“limit the citizenship rights of the Chagossians”.

I do not think the Bill as it stands does that, and I want to be clear about that, but I think it raises an issue which we will come to later in the Bill, which is of concern to a number of us here, about what further rights for the Chagossians are appropriate, given the appalling way in which—we are all agreed—they were treated when they were basically thrown out of their own island.

My specific query, which if my noble friend cannot answer at the moment I would certainly like to hear later on in subsequent amendments, is that I still cannot understand why the military requires the whole of the island of Diego Garcia without any other settlement on it other than what is required for military purposes. I have asked that question of Ministers. The last time I asked my honourable friend Stephen Doughty, the Minister, he answered by saying,

“it is impossible for that to take place”—

that is, to have permanent settlement of Chagossians on Diego Garcia—

“operationally. It is not suitable or appropriate”.

I am very fond of the Minister, but just saying something is not suitable or appropriate, without any further clarification or explanation, is not good enough, as far as I am concerned.

The best I have got so far is to be told that, operationally, it is very difficult if you have civilians alongside the military, and it is much more convenient to the military if they have it all to themselves. In response to that, I can say only that repeatedly, in all parts of the world, including in my former constituency, civilian workers at a base quite happily live adjacent to the base and do a job that is of mutual benefit to the military and the civilian workers.

I think it would be a huge step forward to be able to say to the Chagossians—there may not be many who would want to do it—that those who would really like to settle in the land of their forefathers on Diego Garcia would be able to do that and work at the base or, if necessary, work in other activities as well. So far, I have not had a good argument against that happening, and I hope that at some stage during the passage of this Bill my noble friends can provide me with one.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, I rise in support of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I think the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, was being a little bit unfair on him. He said very clearly that this is an appalling Bill that he wants to stop, and he has an amendment about Clause 1 standing part.

I would like to speak on one point about the Chagossians, which I know we are going to come to later. I agree with the noble Lord 100% on that point. There are quite a few Sri Lankan staff at Diego Garcia and there is no reason why there could not have been put in place some while back a scheme for Chagossians—Chagossians from Mauritius, from the Seychelles, from Crawley, from London—rather than the American airbase employing Sri Lankans. That should be the case. Of course, they did not originally come from Diego Garcia; they lived in some of the islands in the outer archipelago. Diego Garcia, as I understand it, was only sparsely populated historically. That was a very good point and we hope that the Minister will answer it.

Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, how can I add to the tour d’horizon we have had from the Benches on this side of your Lordships’ House, and indeed all sides, as we consider this group of amendments all about the moral and legal rights of the Chagossian people, who have been ignored, marginalised and set completely out of this Government’s process in the handling of the Bill?

I will add only very briefly, as I know we want to move to the end of the group, to dwell on the double standard now at the heart of this debate after the report by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. If we had a grain of sand for the number of times that this Government have given weight, space and gravity to non-binding opinions, rulings, mandates, exhortations and other statements by international bodies of any form, we would be able to recreate the shoreline of the Chagos Archipelago—except when it comes to the report from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Noble Lords have adumbrated the brutal nature of the statement released by that body totally condemning the Bill, and my noble friend Lord Hannan has Amendment 24 in his name which I support on this point. This was the United Nations intervening in the legislative process and suggesting that ratification should be paused altogether.

The United Kingdom has been a state party to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination since 7 March 1969. There are more than 180 states party to that convention. I ask the Minister, who I know is doing her utmost to manage an unmanageable and controversial Bill, just what is the UK Government’s response to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination? How can the Bill possibly be in line with the commitments that the UK Government made under that convention to work to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination when the committee itself has been so clear in its view on the Government’s policy?

I also add my support to the speech of my noble friend Lord Bellingham, who dwelt on the status of this body in the UN family and system at a time when these questions feel so timely and we feel them so sharply. Are the Government really willing to ride roughshod over that opinion and completely ignore it?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I particularly want to speak today because I am on the IRDC. I am proud that we completed a near-impossible task given to us by Parliament, which was to try to summarise the feelings of the Chagossian community on the UK-Mauritius agreement. I do not know precisely, but we had about 10 days to organise that, supervise it and draw up a report. The credit for that, more than anything, should go to our chairman, the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and to the secretaries—it was outstanding that they did that job in a few days before Christmas. It was an impossible job which belatedly answered the question of, “Why don’t we ask the Chagossians what they think about all this?”, but a good job was done.

At the heart of everything is the question of the views of the Chagossians or, perhaps more specifically than that, what has happened to them. Throughout all these debates—I have been involved in most of them one way or another—there is this black cloud over all the amendments and speeches, of the awareness of the profound injustice that was done in a short six-year period under Labour and Conservative Governments to remove some 1,400 to 1,700 people from their homeland in the most objectionable circumstances.

I constantly ask myself why it is not more of a cause celebre than it is. I can only answer that by saying that it was a small number of people. But it is not a small number of people if you are one of the people affected; the effect is 100%. I suppose it goes without saying that if more people had been involved, there would have been far more of an outcry about what happened. I will not repeat some of the things that have been said in the past about the way in which it was done.

I think we all recognise that, and subsequent Governments have recognised that, but it begs the question: what, if anything, can we do? It is not some crime committed in the ancient past; it is a crime committed within the lifetime of many people in this House. What can we, in practical terms, do to put it right?

We have heard a lot today—I am not unsympathetic to this—about holding a referendum. We have had something that has many of the characteristics of a referendum by means of our report, though I am sure that there are plenty of statisticians and experts on these things who would say it could be done far more effectively and far better. However, I am 99% confident about what the result of a referendum would be. It would probably be inconclusive in terms of a huge majority—there are divisions among the Chagossian community, which we know about—but our key themes, which Lord De Mauley has already referred to, are the inevitable consequences of holding a referendum. A referendum would undoubtedly find: the profound suffering

“felt by Chagossian communities at their displacement and a yearning for redress. Concern that the Mauritian government may not be able to fulfil the aspirations of Chagossians. A clear wish for greater Chagossian agency in future decisions made about the islands”.

We should therefore not expect anything stunning if the amendment is passed and there is a referendum. It would take time and be challenged by whoever were to lose it should the result be narrow. There are clear and distinct divisions among the Chagossians and there would be the usual arguments about who would be eligible to vote and about referendums, but writ large in this case.

We cannot redress the injustices of the past. We should focus our attention not on speculating about prolonging the process or on further referrals to further committees. We should concentrate on the heart of the practical things that could be done, of which there is one above all else. More than anything, the Chagossians want the right, whether they exercise it or not, to return to their homeland, even if it is only for visits. We are told by the military—I have no reason to dispute this—that that is simply not feasible so far as Diego Garcia is concerned. A Minister from the Commons, Stephen Doughty, who came before our committee when we produced an earlier report, had this to say. Even noble Lords who have not been in Parliament that long or been listening to Ministers’ responses for long will see the flaw in it. I asked, “Why can’t Chagossian people work at the depot? Why can’t they live side by side with the military if that is what some of them wish?” I was told that operationally it is “unsuitable and inappropriate”.

Unsuitable and inappropriate are pretty slippery terms which do not satisfy me unless they can be elaborated upon. That is what I speak to my noble friends on the Front Bench about. Diego Garcia is the only island in practical terms that people will desire to inhabit or re-inhabit. What is it especially about this military base that makes it impossible for civilian workers to live and work on that island but on a different part of it? Wherever you go in the United Kingdom, you will find examples of the military working alongside workers who go into the depot every morning, through security, and go back home in the evening. So far, I have had no satisfactory answer to that question, but an ounce of help is worth a pound of pity. If a practical proposal could be put forward to the Chagossians to say that contract workers work there all the time, and that we will give first refusal for any contract work that is required to native-born Chagossians, that is not an unreasonable request—we mentioned it in our report—but it would be action rather than words.

I close wishing we were not in this position and wishing that this particularly shameful period of British history had not happened, but there is no point in simply emitting words of anguish. What is needed now is one or two practical attempts to make the lives of Chagossians, who were so unjustly treated, more acceptable, and I put that to my Front Bench.