UK-Mauritius Agreement on the Chagos Archipelago

Lord McDonald of Salford Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord McDonald of Salford (CB)]

My Lords, the most damaging blow to any country’s international reputation is a justified charge of hypocrisy. The United Kingdom stands for the rule of law in all circumstances. We lose credibility when we seek exceptions to this principle for ourselves.

Opponents of the Chagos agreement claim that the International Court of Justice has no jurisdiction, so the UK can safely ignore its rulings. They point out that, in February 2019, the ICJ handed down merely an advisory opinion. However, although we might choose to ignore it, other bodies of the United Nations cannot: they are bound by it. We have already seen that with the ITLOS judgment of 2021.

As we weigh the merits of the agreement, we need also to take account of the history of the archipelago, which came to the UK with the rest of the colony of Mauritius in the Treaty of Paris 1814. Although Mauritius and Chagos are about 2,000 miles apart, the historic link is strong, perpetuated by the UK as colonial power. Administratively, it suited our predecessors to treat all British possessions in the Indian Ocean as one colony.

At the start of the era of decolonisation, the UN set out the rules of the road. In December 1960, the General Assembly decided that the colonial power could not break up a colony as it was leaving. We ignored that ruling when we decided in 1965 that Chagos would be detached from the rest of Mauritius at independence, which happened in 1968.

Over the next five decades, we did all we could to avoid a case going to the ICJ, but we lost the key vote in the General Assembly in 2017 by 94 votes to 15. Once we were in the arbitration, we could not, in my view, ignore the outcome. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that trying to invoke protections we had written into the rules decades before persuaded nobody but ourselves.

Opponents dislike the expense of the deal; well, we are paying the going rate as a tenant for a base in the wider Indian Ocean—somewhat more than the French in Djibouti, but we are getting more for more. Diego Garcia is the best defensive real estate in the whole Indian Ocean. Even though £101 million per year is a lot, it is a lot less than the Americans pay to run the base. It is a joint base, and we are paying our way in the joint effort.

Next, opponents claim that the agreement boosts China’s presence in the Indian Ocean. The reverse is true: Mauritius is one of only two of the 55 members of the African Union not to be part of China’s belt and road initiative. While 3% of Mauritius’s population is ethnically Chinese, 67% is ethnically Indian. Our partner in Delhi looms much larger in Mauritian calculations than our challenger in Beijing.

Opponents and supporters agree on one thing: more needs to be done to alleviate the plight of the Chagossians. Over generations, they have been treated monstrously: forcibly transplanted to the archipelago to tend copra plantations, mostly in the 20th century, then forcibly removed in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the base. We must make amends. The agreement goes partway to doing that and, for the first time, it allows Mauritius to resettle the outer islands.

Confronted with a charge of double standards, some opponents of this agreement shrug their shoulders; they think that they can get away with it and tough it out, but that is what the powerful and unprincipled do. That is what Russia does. Neither the Biden nor Trump Administrations endorsed such a cavalier approach. In effect, they both told us that we had a problem and asked us to solve it. This agreement does precisely that. It gives the UK and our American allies a secure presence in the archipelago for the next 140 years. It enhances our security and restores our reputation as a country that respects international law, even when it is inconvenient and costly.

I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, chair of my committee, the International Agreements Committee: the agreement deserves the support of your Lordships’ House.