Wow. I never knew about this.
In the late 1990s,
islanders from the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, sued for the right to return home, and in 2000 a British court ruled that the 1971
ordinance banning them from the islands was unlawful. U.S. and British officials opposed the plan for resettlement, but in 2006 the court upheld its decision. In 2007 the British government lost its case before the
Court of Appeal but announced its intention to challenge that decision in the
House of Lords. The following year a majority of the panel of five Law Lords ruled against the islanders, although the government expressed regret for the original removal. In 2017 the
UN General Assembly formally requested that the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) review whether the decolonization of Mauritius, with regard to the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, had been lawfully completed and what the
consequences of British rule over the Chagos Archipelago had been. The ICJ’s ruling, which came in February 2019, found that the decolonization process had been illegal and recommended that the United Kingdom return the islands to Mauritius as soon as possible. The ruling was advisory and therefore nonbinding, although it did have some influence on the international stage. There is no permanent population on Diego Garcia, although some 4,000 U.S. and British military and contract civilian personnel are stationed on the atoll.
Diego Garcia, coral atoll, largest and southernmost member of the Chagos Archipelago, in the central Indian Ocean. Administratively, it was a dependency of Mauritius for most of its history, but since 1965 it has been part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Learn more about Diego Garcia here.
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