Britain should give up control of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean “as rapidly as possible,” the UN’s top court said on Monday in a decades-old row with Mauritius over an archipelago that is home to a huge US airbase.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said in a legal opinion that Britain had illegally split the islands from Mauritius before independence in 1968, after which the entire population of islanders was evicted.
Mauritius and the exiled Chagossians reacted with delight to the opinion delivered by judges in The Hague, Netherlands, which is non-binding, but will carry heavy symbolic and political weight.
Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth hailed a “ historic moment for Mauritius and all its people.”
“Our territorial integrity will now be made complete, and when that occurs, the Chagossians and their descendants will finally be able to return home,” he said in a statement.
However, Britain defended its hold on the islands, saying that the Diego Garcia military base, which has been used to bomb Iraq and Afghanistan, protected people around the world.
“The United Kingdom’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago constitutes a wrongful act,” Chief Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf said.
“The United Kingdom is under an obligation to bring an end to its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible, thereby allowing Mauritius to complete the decolonization of its territory,” he added.
The UN General Assembly in 2017 adopted a resolution presented by Mauritius and backed by African countries asking the ICJ to offer legal advice on the island chain’s fate and the legality of the deportations.
Diego Garcia is now under lease to the US and played a key strategic role in the Cold War before being used as a staging ground for US bombing campaigns against Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.
Olivier Bancoult, chairman of the Mauritius-based Chagos Refugees Group, told reporters outside the court that he was “so happy.”
“It is a big victory against an injustice done by the British government for many years. We people have been suffering for many years — I am so lucky today,” he said.
The ICJ opinion comes as a stunning blow to London in a case that goes to the heart of historic issues of decolonization and current questions about Britain’s place in the world as it prepares to leave the EU.
Mauritius’ lawyer, Philippe Sands, said there was “no wiggle room” in the judges’ view.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing