LONDON — The Conservatives tore into the U.K. government’s decision to hand the disputed Chagos Islands, home of a key U.S. military base, to Mauritius.
The opposition party on Monday lambasted Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s explanation for why Mauritius is being given control of the archipelago, which has been described as the U.K.’s last African colony.
It includes the U.S. airbase on Diego Garcia, although that will remain under U.K.-U.S. control for at least the next 99 years under a deal struck last week.
Lammy told MPs in a House of Commons grilling Monday that a decision had to be made by the British state due to the island’s “contested” status. He said a legal judgment could have meant Britain choosing between “abandoning the base altogether or breaking international law.”
Mauritius has long argued it was forced to give the Chagos Islands away in return for its own independence from Britain, with more than 1,000 islanders forcibly removed at the request of the U.S.
A 2019 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice, which adjudicates on disputes between nations, found that the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius was “not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned.”
It said the U.K. was “under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible.”
The foreign secretary also highlighted that negotiations had begun under the previous Conservative government, and said indecision threatened the future of the base, potentially harming U.S. relations.
But Shadow Foreign Secretary Andrew Mitchell accused Britain of giving away a “key strategic military asset to a state which has never controlled it, and to which the Chagossian people feel little affinity, if any” amid intense geopolitical instability.
Transfer of the islands “gives succour to our enemies … and undermines the strategic web of Britain’s defense interests,” he argued.
Backbench Tory MP Andrew Rosindell said it was a “shameful day for British democracy” accusing the U.K. of a lack of consultation with Chagossians.
Former Tory Leader Iain Duncan Smith, a long-time critic of China, said the Mauritian government was “guilty of vast human rights abuses” by locking up independent politicians and described it as “in league with the Chinese.”
The foreign secretary was asked by Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage about American support for the deal under a second Donald Trump presidency. “We have sought to take views across the U.S. political establishment,” Lammy said.
