Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Rather than allowing the opinions of legal certainty to be constrained by the circumstances of the non-legally binding judgment, the Government’s approach going forward should be fully animated by appreciation of the following truths. First, it was just as wrong of us to split the colony that covered Mauritius and the islands before decolonisation without consulting the Chagossians, let alone providing them with self-determination, as it would have been to refuse to split the Gilbert and Ellice Islands before decolonisation after having afforded the Ellice Islands a self-determination referendum in which they elected to separate. Secondly, it was profoundly wrong for us to forcibly remove the Chagossians from the Chagos Islands between 1968 and 1973. It was and is profoundly wrong that, from 1973 until today, we have refused to return the Chagos Islands to the Chagossians. In this context, the Government should produce a report that considers all the legal ways forward. I submit that the one best equipped to provide unassailable legal certainty is to afford the Chagossian people a self-determination referendum and to implement its results. I beg to move.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow. I thank the Ministers for the patience and courtesy that they have displayed all evening. The two Ministers and the Whip know that they are among my favourite Peers, not just my favourite Government Front-Benchers, and they have been very patient and good-humoured.

I take issue with the idea that this is a done deal. That is an argument that has run through a lot of the debates and this seems to be the apt amendment on which to take it on. We have been told repeatedly—including by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, last week, and again just before dinner by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard—that the treaty has been signed and been passed by the CRaG process and that therefore all this is, as it were, dancing after the music, and we would be exposing ourselves to a much more dangerous situation if we now try to hold it up.

I ask the Committee to ponder the possibility that the CRaG process has not in fact been a full democratic exercise. There has been no vote. Everything was rushed through from Second Reading in one day—there was no Report stage. I have never been a Member of the other place, unlike some of your Lordships present, but, as I understand it, you have a vote in the CRaG process by moving an amendment or a resolution and then voting for it. Looking online, I see that there is such an amendment, standing in the name of my right honourable friend the Leader of the Opposition and others, signed by 107 Members of the other place, from six political parties. I concede that that is not nearly as big a deal as it would have been a decade ago—there has been something of a splintering of parties. As yet, there has been no vote on it.

I mention this because the idea that therefore we have no option except to tweak statements at the margin and polish the edges of this, and cannot look for substantive changes, is fundamentally at odds with what was promised when the CRaG process was brought in. If the treaty was rushed through without debate in another place, surely the only proper scrutiny and the only proper chance of amendment is in this Chamber. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords on all sides will feel uninhibited when it comes to moving and, in due course, voting on substantive amendments. This is the one realistic opportunity that we have to make the points that would be made by the people from the Chagos Islands watching us now if they had a voice in our counsels.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, reminds us, this amendment gets to the core of the criticisms that have been levelled against the Government’s approach to this Bill so far. As my noble friend Lord Lilley pointed out numerous times during the debates on the first day in Committee, it is very difficult to see which court could have delivered a binding judgment against the UK on the question of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. Yet it is the repeated contention of the Government that this treaty is somehow essential to deliver legal certainty.

The question remains of which court could have delivered a binding judgment that would have threatened that legal certainty and the security of the military base. I hope that the Government can finally provide us with an answer. If they cannot answer that question then the argument that this treaty and this Bill were both necessary falls apart. Indeed, the argument that the treaty and the Bill are needed urgently also falls apart, and we should consider whether the Government should take a more circumspect approach. That is what the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, suggests.

If this treaty is necessary, Ministers must surely have considered other options before coming to this agreement with Mauritius. Perhaps the Minister can tell the Committee what consideration was given to resettlement of the Chagos Archipelago by Chagossians, for example. What would the cost have been for that? What is the difference between that cost figure and the true cost associated with this treaty? I say “true cost” because the Government’s initial claims on costs have now been thoroughly discredited.

There were lots of options that should have been considered, so perhaps the noble Baroness can tell us what options were in fact considered. I understand that these are specific questions about the process followed by Ministers before agreeing to the treaty with Mauritius, so if the noble Baroness cannot say with certainty what potential approaches were considered, perhaps she could write to us to confirm the details.

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Moved by

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere]

20L: 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 potential implications for other British Overseas Territories that would arise from this Act and the Treaty.”

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lord, I beg leave to propose my Amendments 20L, 20N and 20P. In the interests of brevity and immediacy, I will speak only on Amendment 20L, because I have covered the others in previous groups. This is the amendment that requires the Secretary of State to look at the impact of this treaty on other British Overseas Territories and the implications for their sovereignty.

Of course, we are always told in these situations by whoever is in government, “Oh, it’s a unique situation, you can’t compare”. On one level, that is a truism. Of course, all these situations are unique, yet I think it would be extremely naive not to consider the possibility that they will be fallen upon hungrily by people who want a change to the status quo. The idea that even now there are not politicians and lawyers in Buenos Aires or Madrid looking at the implications of this deal and saying, “How can we press this into the parallel arguments that we have for claims over British Overseas Territories?” is utterly fanciful.

They may already be putting out feelers to British lawyers, who seem very happy to work against the interests of the Crown on these questions. The representative of Mauritius in this case gave an interview in which he gloried in the fact that he lived in a country where you could humiliate the Government. If he is not available, perhaps by then the Attorney-General will no longer be in politics, or indeed perhaps the Prime Minister. They also both have long records of working on cases of this kind.

I suspect that the briefs that will be put in front of them will make the claim that Britain has now, in practice, for all that there was no jurisdiction, for all that it was an advisory ruling, for all that Commonwealth disputes were excluded, conceded this extraordinary and perilous precedent that, if a territory was at one time or another ruled from somewhere else, that establishes the basis of a sovereignty claim. I do not think it is completely fanciful for these elements in foreign countries to feel that they will be dealing with sympathetic elements within the United Kingdom.

Indeed, they have had experience of that. If we think of the experience of our relations with Argentina prior to the war in 1982, we can understand why the Argentines felt that Britain was going to move on the subject. We had the 1968 Anglo-Argentine memorandum, which expressly talked about sovereignty being on the agenda. We then had the persistent proposals throughout the 1970s for the leaseback arrangement, and then the withdrawal of HMS “Endurance”. Argentina is a country I know well, and indeed I have had the privilege of visiting the Falkland Islands as well. To this day, I am often told by Argentine politicians that Margaret Thatcher led them on to the punch—that Britain deliberately looked as though it was preparing to withdraw from the islands in order to provoke this conflict. I think that is nonsense. None the less, you can understand why they think that there are sympathetic elements here.

Similarly, if we look at relations between Britain and Madrid in the run-up to the Córdoba agreement over Gibraltar, the 1990s were a time of constant proposals from this side for some kind of joint sovereignty. It was only a referendum of the Gibraltarian people that put a stop to that process. By the way, it was a referendum that official Britain detested and for a long time did not reconcile itself to and ignored, until it became politically impossible and a new dispensation was reached. So, yes, this will be looked at in Buenos Aires and Madrid.

It will be looked at, I am sure, by those in Nicosia. They will think that there is an extremely close parallel there, in the sense that this is a military installation rather than an ethnically separate population. Again, they will say “This was ruled from somewhere else and we have a claim”. When I was a Member of the European Parliament, I would often get petitions and resolutions from Greek Cypriot MEPs raising the issue of the base.

What all these claims have in common is that final resolutions are never treated as final by the other party, any more than the final and binding resolution was with Mauritius in 1965. I do not want to bore noble Lords on this, but I feel it bears repetition. Mauritius trousered a large sum of money in exchange for perpetually renouncing any claim over the Chagos Islands.

In fact, there are very few British Overseas Territories that have not at some point been ruled from somewhere else. In addition to the ones I have mentioned, I was listing just now which ones have at some point had some other seat of government. Cayman, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos, St Helena and Montserrat were all, at some point or another, ruled by someone else. All of them will be looking at this as a precedent and a claim.

What all our overseas territories have in common is that they are all content with their present status. The British Empire was unusual in the peaceful and voluntary nature of the way it was relinquished: not completely, not universally—there were tragic exceptions in Cyprus, India and Kenya—but they were the exceptions. They were not the rule. Decolonisation in Malaysia was a perfectly peaceful process, for example. The only argument was about whether the British should stay longer to defeat the Communist insurgents. It was a generally peaceful process in the Caribbean and in most of Africa, so the places that have stayed are the places that wanted to stay, and they made that very clear, in the cases of the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar in quite recent memory, with overwhelming referendums. It seems to me that they will now be looking to those referendums as their one shield: the only thing that potentially distinguishes them. But of course they will be vulnerable to the argument that, if we are treating Mauritius rather than the Chagos Islands as the unit, why should we not treat all of Cyprus as the unit, since that was once partitioned in a similar way at the time of independence? They will all be extremely alarmed by that precedent.

It seems to me there is only one way of reassuring these countries, which is to allow a referendum of the Chagossians, dispersed and scattered as they may be. Then, if the Chagossians vote in favour, it does not matter. We would not be setting any precedent. We would be following the principle of self-determination. If the Chagossians vote to be Mauritian, that is of no concern to Gibraltarians or Falkland Islanders or anyone else, because the principle of self-determination would be upheld. But at least let us give them the vote.

We are privileged in this country to be custodians, stewards, of a largely maritime sovereign area. If we put together the oceans around our overseas territories, they are about the same size as India. We are in charge of some of the richest and most important marine environments, and that is our real string of pearls. The pearls are there because in every case they want to be on the string. Let us not set the precedent of tearing one of those pearls off and hurling it away in defiance of the wishes of the people most involved. I beg to move.

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)]

My Lords, in his remarks, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, has tried to pre-empt the comments that I was about to make. I remember well the Falklands War in 1982. I remember many negotiations with Spain about Gibraltar. I remember the struggles with China over Hong Kong. I remember discussions about the future of the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands—both of which I have visited—as well as discussions about the future of St Helena, Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Anguilla and the sovereign territories in Cyprus. In each case, the discussions took place on the basis of the interests of each sovereign territory concerned and I believe that that will remain the case. I cannot see why this treaty over the British Indian Ocean islands and the Chagos Islands will affect the discussions that we will have with our other overseas territories about their futures. I think that the situation will remain as it has been in the past, so I do not feel that I can support this amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hannan.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I accept that about the ICJ, but the point is that other countries will act on an advisory opinion even if we choose to ignore it. We have not chosen to ignore it. That is a judgment call. Partly, that is because we think that, by negotiating now, we negotiate from a stronger position than we would have had we waited for other, binding judgments. Those judgments can come from any treaty to which both parties are signed up. That is why we feel—and not everyone has to agree with the Government on this—that there is sufficient legal question that we needed to act and to negotiate. If they are honest with themselves—there is a lack of former Ministers who were responsible for this arguing the point that the noble Lord makes; they argue other points but not this one—there was sufficient legal jeopardy for the previous Government to enter into this process. I hope noble Lords will withdraw their amendments.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for dealing so comprehensively with all those points, and to all noble Lords who contributed: the noble Baronesses, Lady Hoey and Lady Ludford, my noble friends Lord Bellingham and Lord Lilley, the noble Lords, Lord Weir and Lord Purvis, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu.

On finality, almost all treaties are said to be final at the time but they are not always treated as final by one or both parties. The treaty of Utrecht was pretty final. It said that Spain would have first refusal if Britain ever left, but it was pretty final about granting sovereignty. I absolutely agree, as the Minister says, that Spain has now agreed to a permanent settlement, but it is one of many, and experience tells us that incoming Governments do not always regard treaties signed by their predecessors as final. Indeed, the treaty we signed when Mauritius became independent and renounced all claim to the Chagos Islands was said to be permanent at the time, so I am less reassured than I think she hoped I might have been.

Let me put it the other way around: the way to make these treaties final is to stop inviting people, through our behaviour, to reopen them—to refuse to countenance it. The French had a very similar issue in the Comoros; they just refused to countenance it. I cannot see any other country doing what we are doing now. Indeed, I am afraid to say I cannot see any British Government other than this one having done it.

I do not want to get into the whole history of the Malayan emergency, but there is a wonderful record that, when Malaysia became independent, one of the first acts of the new Government was to give some very valuable land containing the house called Carcosa Seri Negara—a very fine house—to Britain in perpetuity as sovereign British territory. It became the seat of the high commission in Kuala Lumpur in recognition of all the things that we had done together. A young anti-colonialist Minister said, “But if we give them the best land in KL, no one will believe that we fought for our independence”, and there was a rather awkward moment around the Cabinet table because, of course, they did not: we were in Malaya supporting a democratic Government against a communist insurgency. We would have left much earlier had we not had the requests of that Government to remain and support them. That is getting slightly off topic so, with your Lordships’ permission, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 20L withdrawn.

Moved by

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere]

20M: 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 impact of Article 6 of the Treaty and the transfer of sovereignty under this Act on Chagossian civic identity.”

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, nationality has two distinct meanings: it is what it says on our passports, but it is also what we feel. The second of those, the sense of identity and belonging, of being a link in a chain between past and future generations, can be unconnected to territory.

Perhaps the supreme example of nationality that exists in the heart is the State of Israel. History affords few stories like it: a people who for 2,000 years were stateless and scattered but never lost the aspiration of statehood—“Next year in Jerusalem”. Then, one day, quite extraordinarily and almost providentially, they fulfilled it. The British Government recognised a claim of nationality based on cultural, ethnic and religious homogeneity, even though it had been unrelated to territory since time immemorial.

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[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.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

I thank the Minister. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, who were diligent and eloquent in their defence of the dispossessed Chagossians. Sometimes people approach the story of Britain overseas as a kind of morality play where Britain plays the villain, the Alan Rickman of the global drama. We heard a hint of it, I think, from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, in the previous round. Every disengagement was somehow disagreeable. Here, the disagreeable thing is pulling out in a way that disregards the wishes of the people who have been most injured. I was grateful to the Minister for making the clarification on birth certificates. She is doing enormously well defending this position, I have to say. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 20M withdrawn.

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[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.

[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.

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[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 82, which is consequential upon Amendment 80. As the Minister referred to before, Amendment 80 had attracted some flattering imitation yesterday, but nevertheless I hope that we might be able to see progress on what I would consider to be a serious proposal to address some of the concerns that have been raised very sincerely. As the noble Lord, Lord Jay, said earlier, we have a lot of history to make good, and I agree.

This has been an unusual Committee stage of a Bill in many respects. Perhaps it is because this legislation and the treaty that it is connected to will have, unlike some other legislation that we often might consider to be indirect, a direct impact on people’s lives. They are a defined but diverse group of individuals who have been in touch with many noble Lords. Therefore, I believe that we have an obligation to treat this seriously. In Committee, there have been many passionate, but also proper and probing, questions on how the terms of the treaty will operate and how UK interests will also continue to be represented. We have just heard that from the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and we heard it earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad.

Amendment 80 in my name is a proposition for an ongoing inter-parliamentary committee for the duration of the treaty. The Minister mentioned before that she felt it was perhaps a novel response. It is not entirely novel; there are precedents which I have based this on. There have been quite frequently free trade agreements that had parliamentary committees associated with them. There is the EFTA agreement, which the UK had been part of. There was the AWEPA for our African partners in parliaments, which we had been part of. There is doubt from many about how critical parts of the treaty negotiated by this Government will be handled, both by the UK and the Mauritian Governments, and operate through the commission.

We have heard many references today to the deeply flawed Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. It was fascinating for me to listen to this debate, because this House in 2021 passed a Motion—it happened to be in my name—about the ability for Parliament to have a straight up-and-down vote on treaties. The House passed an amendment to the then Trade Bill which stated that negotiating objectives or before-treaty negotiations would have to be presented to both Houses, and the House of Commons would have an opportunity to vote on those. I believe that those aspects would have been beneficial for this treaty. I think the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, forgot that he voted against that, so I am happy to remind him, just for the record, that on the latter part—on the first part, he was not in the House—in one of his very first votes in this House, he was against what he has been arguing so passionately for today.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My point is that there has not been a vote in the other place, so the only proper chance is here.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

No, the case that the noble Lord was making passionately was about the faults in the CRaG process, and I agree with him about that. It is just that if he had not had his view, with his noble friends, in 2021, we would have had the enhanced processes for treaty scrutiny.

However, we are we are because the current Government were supportive of changing the CRaG process for up-down votes on treaties, and now they are against. The Opposition, who had been against then, are now in favour of it. It probably has to do with whoever is sitting on the government side of the House, rather than the opposition side, but we are where we are now. The issue is how we go forward, to some extent. That is not denying that there is still Report stage, and there will still be divisions potentially, but I wanted to flag at this stage, in Committee, the proposal to try to address some of the major concerns.

Before briefly addressing that specific part of the amendment, I want to put something on record, as there have been quite a few allusions today to the notion that the negotiations on this treaty were halted by the previous Administration. In a letter to the Foreign Affairs Committee from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, on 5 April 2024—just seven weeks before the Dissolution of Parliament—he reaffirmed that negotiations were ongoing and that questions on the future administration of the islands were subject to the ongoing bilateral negotiations between the UK and Mauritius. He also said in the letter:

“We will continue to update Chagossians as negotiations progress”.


The negotiations were ongoing at the time of the election. It is worth stating that on the record, because there has been quite a bit of misleading information today. It is interesting that the Foreign Affairs Committee had been making the case since 2008 for a strong moral case for resettlement. That was denied again in the letter from the Foreign Secretary in April 2024.

We have a moral duty to try to ensure that, whatever circumstances arise from the parliamentary proceedings, we have a mechanism by which we allow the Chagossian community to be represented. Through Amendment 80, my proposal is for an inter-parliamentary committee, with MPs from the Republic of Mauritius and MPs from the UK forming a committee for the duration of the treaty. We know, and I agree with much of what has been said today, that trust is low to non-existent among many in the Chagossian community and suspicion is very high. I acknowledge all of that. A means by which that can perhaps be addressed as the treaty is implemented, if it is brought into force, is one where UK and Mauritian parliamentarians, through dialogue, debate and mutual understanding, can observe and scrutinise their respective Executives. Back in their Parliaments, they can scrutinise how the treaty is operating, the implementation of the treaty, whether rights of return are being implemented, the right to self-determination as understood in customary international law, and access to compensation, resettlement and other forms of support.

The commission in the treaty is executive but this would add a parliamentary oversight function, which I believe would be of value. I hope that the amendment will receive cross-party support. I am open to discussing its particular wording, but I hope that the principle will receive support. We owe a moral duty to that community for ongoing representations to address their concerns and suspicions. I therefore beg to move Amendment 80.