British Indian Ocean Territory: Sovereignty

Commons Urgent Question

The following Answer to an Urgent Question was given in the House of Commons on Wednesday 2 July.

“I thank the right honourable Lady for her Question. On 22 May, the Diego Garcia treaty was signed and laid before the House. As the Defence Secretary told the House on the day of the signature, this treaty secures the strategically important UK-US military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The Diego Garcia military base is essential to the security of the UK and our key allies, including the United States, and is essential to keeping the British people safe. It is also one of our most significant contributions to the transatlantic defence and security partnership.

The base enables rapid deployment of operations and forces across the Middle East, east Africa and south Asia, helping combat some of the most challenging threats, including from terrorism and hostile states, and it has a unique strategic location. The treaty ensures that the UK retains complete operational control of Diego Garcia well into the next century. It has robust security measures that prevent threats from the outer islands of the archipelago, including: a 24 nautical mile buffer zone where nothing can be built or placed without UK consent; a rigorous process to prevent activities on the wider islands; a strict ban on foreign security forces on the outer islands, whether civilian or military; and a binding obligation to ensure the base is never undermined. These robust provisions give the UK an effective veto over any activity that presents a clear and direct threat to the base on Diego Garcia, and they will categorically prevent our adversaries from compromising the base.

The treaty sets out that it can be ratified once both parties have completed their relevant domestic processes, and for the UK this of course includes scrutiny of the treaty by Parliament and making the necessary changes to domestic law. The treaty was laid before the House on the day of signature for scrutiny under the usual process set out in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. We welcome the report into the treaty by the International Agreements Committee in the other place, which recognised the importance of ratifying the treaty to secure the base, and the debate on Monday in the other place in which Peers rejected a cynical Conservative Motion to block ratification.

Nevertheless, before the treaty is ratified, the Government will also bring forward primary legislation, as I have said on many occasions, which will be scrutinised and debated in the usual way, and secondary legislation as necessary. Ahead of ratification, the Government will also make a ministerial Statement in both Houses, providing a factual update on Chagossian eligibility for resettlement and on the modalities of the Chagossian trust fund. That will also enable further discussion in a proper manner. The treaty will then enter into force on the first day of the month following the date on which both parties have exchanged letters confirming these processes are complete.

This landmark agreement secures the future of our strategically critical UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. It is, as I said, a crucial contribution to the defence and security partnerships that we hold. As the Defence Secretary told this House, there was no alternative but to act, and in so doing we have protected Britons at home and overseas”.

My Lords, watching this UQ in the other place yesterday was a slightly surreal experience. The Lib Dem spokesman said it was a shambolic process—he was obviously correct, although he clearly had not consulted his colleagues in this Chamber, who had voted for it 24 hours earlier. Government is about choices, particularly when there are limited resources, although it seems that Labour Back-Benchers have not realised this yet. The Government must allocate those limited resources to their most pressing priorities. We know that this £30 billion Chagos giveaway is being partly funded from the noble Baroness’s overseas development budget, although she has so far refused on a number of occasions to tell us exactly how much of it. How did she come to the view that funding tax cuts for Mauritians was a greater priority than funding other ODA programmes which provide, for example, life-saving vaccinations to children?

I see that we are back to the charming noble Lord, Lord Callanan, whom we used to know and love. The cost of this will be around £100 million a year. That is about the cost of running the NHS for five hours or the Queen Elizabeth vessel—I hesitate to say which type, so I will not try. This is excellent value. It secures our ability to share this base with the United States and it is fundamental to our security in this country. It enables us to fight terrorism and keep ourselves safe. This is nothing to do with the ODA budget, as the noble Lord well knows. I will leave the spokesman for the Liberal Democrats to deal with whatever feud they have going on about process.

My Lords, I have in my hand a BBC News report of Jeremy Corbyn welcoming the Government’s decision on the exercise of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands. It reports that he was “very pleased” that the UK Government had backed down and said that the Foreign Secretary’s announcement was a “good step forward”. That report was from 3 November 2022. Jeremy Corbyn was welcoming the Liz Truss Government’s announcement in Parliament that negotiations would open on the ceding of sovereignty. What has happened since then—one would think that any agreement between Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss is not one that we would follow—was a shambolic process in which the Chagossian community was denied its rights under the Conservative Government and not consulted sufficiently by the Labour Government. There has been insufficient information about the trust fund; the money was not going to be provided by the previous Government and there is a lack of detail from this Government.

There is no feud between me and my Commons colleagues, because the position is perfectly apparent. When this House had an opportunity to secure a concession from the Government to have more information about the funding and to include the Chagossian community in a much better way, because it had been let down by the previous Government and this Government, we took the opportunity to try to end the shambles. When will we see the Statement that the Minister promised me on Monday?

The Statement will be provided in due course. You will not find anybody in this House who gives less regard to what Jeremy Corbyn thinks than I do, although there is clearly some stiff competition.

The trust fund is important, because it is right that there is some acknowledgement and a fund to support Chagossians. I believe it will be held by the Mauritians. It is important to understand that there is a range of views about this within the Chagossian communities. There is not one voice; Chagossians living in different parts of the world—in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles—do not all agree on this. I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Lord says about the Chagossian communities having been badly treated over many decades. That is undoubtedly true, but it is not right to suggest to them that there is a way for them to resettle Diego Garcia or a straightforward way of holding some sort of process, when this treaty has been forged between the two sovereign Governments of Mauritius and the UK. This is a unique situation. We have prioritised our national security in this process. You can have only one priority, and that is our national security. That is right, but it does not mean that we cannot acknowledge and regret some of the issues that the noble Lord brings to our attention.

My Lords, in the debate on Monday I had the chance to namecheck the Chagos all-party parliamentary group, which I think was founded in 2008. I have been involved in it for a lot of that time. I think it would recognise that this treaty is the first time the Chagossians have secured the right to visit and the possibility of resettlement in Chagos, which the all-party group has long campaigned for. I do not often agree with the right honourable Member for Islington North, whom I stood against in 1992, but he is president of our all-party group and I have to pay tribute to him; he has long worked to champion the Chagossians when successive Governments have ignored them.

What is useful in the noble Baroness’s contribution is that she draws attention to the fact that, under this treaty, Chagossians will be able to visit the outer islands and resettle, should that be feasible, with co-operation from the Government of Mauritius. That is by no means a straightforward undertaking when there is a complete lack of services. We should not talk about it lightly. There will also be the ability to visit Diego Garcia. These visits stopped some years ago, so their recommencement will be a welcome development.

My Lords, is it not the case that the right to visit is in the hands of the Mauritian Government, as is the trust fund that has been set up, which is capitalised by the United Kingdom Government? Therefore, Chagossians living in the United Kingdom, who have been denied their rights for so long, as we hear from all sides of the House, will be denied access to this trust fund.

We had to make a choice here. We could have prioritised the rights of the Chagossian community and enabled them to have the right to return and settle on Diego Garcia. That would have undermined the security and viability of the UK-US base, so we thought that was the wrong path to take. We have prioritised national security. The noble Baroness can disagree with that choice. She may suggest that she would have prioritised the Chagossians’ right to return. That is a pretty interesting position for any credible, responsible Government of the United Kingdom to adopt, and it is not one that we have chosen.

My Lords, my memory is not as good as it used to be, so can the Minister help me? How long ago were the Chagossians removed from their homeland? How many discussions and debates did the previous Government have on this matter, and has she heard any more hypocrisy from the Opposition Front Bench than we have heard today?

I mean, there is plenty. They were removed more than 50 years ago, and we can discuss the wrong of that. It was done, as Members will no doubt observe, under a Labour Government. That is all true. That does not change where we are today. Under successive Governments, including Conservative-led ones, it was recognised that negotiations were necessary to secure the legal footing of the base. I know that the ruling was advisory, but it was soon to be followed by a binding ruling. We could choose to disregard that binding ruling. Other nations would be unlikely to choose to disregard it.

There is no binding ruling.

I just said that there is no binding ruling but we anticipate that there would be one, which is presumably why the previous Government were negotiating. The decision we have taken secures the base. It gives a sound legal footing. It means that our allies and friends, whom we rely on to make that base work and supply it with all the things necessary to run it well, can now proceed on a secure legal footing. It has been welcomed by our allies across the world, including the United States.