The UK-Mauritius treaty on the Chagos Archipelago will transfer sovereignty of the islands back to Mauritius, while maintaining an initial 99-year lease on the joint UK/US military base on Diego ...

Dame Priti Patel asked whether ministers ‘are afraid’ of Labour backbenchers, who might ‘force them into another embarrassing U-turn’.

The UK has agreed to pay Mauritius at least £120 million a year to lease back the Diego Garcia base post-handover.

I have spent much of my life studying predatory fishes in East Africa’s coastal waters, but never have I been more concerned ...

First, they prevented any Chagossians who had left on vacation or for medical treatment from returning home. Next, they cut ...

Mauritius is ‘likely’ to resume its campaign to secure a judgment on sovereignty against Britain unless the agreement is rubber-stamped, ...

The Chagos Islands, an archipelago of 58 islands in the Indian Ocean about halfway between Tanzania and Indonesia, were given to Britain by France in 1814 during the Napoleonic Wars.

Britain took control of Mauritius from 1810 when it was seized from the French. Between 1814 and 1965 the Chagos Archipelago was administered by the UK as a dependency of the Mauritius colony.

Negotiations to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius began under the previous ... that Chagossians would be allowed to settle on the outer islands of the archipelago, he told peers ...

Around 2,000 Chagos residents were forcibly removed to make way for the building of the military base on Diego Garcia. In 2019, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued its “advisory ...

Story so far: Mauritius won a strategic victory on May 22, 2025, when the United Kingdom (U.K.) officially handed over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands after finalising the political treaty ...