Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Committee (1st Day)

Amendment 1

1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause— “Purpose(1) The purpose of this Act is to—(a) cede sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago,(b) dissolve the British Indian Ocean Territory,(c) provide for the continued British administration of Diego Garcia, and(d) limit the citizenship rights of the Chagossians.(2) Nothing in this Act grants or recognises that Mauritius has sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment seeks to add a purpose clause to the Bill to demonstrate more clearly the Government’s intentions in bringing forward this legislation.

My Lords, as my noble friend Lady Noakes said at Second Reading, this Bill is right up there in contention for the title of “worst Bill of this Session”. It is a surrender Bill and the Government should be ashamed of having brought it before your Lordships’ House. The sparsely populated Labour Benches—congratulations to the three Members who have turned up—illustrate how unpopular it is on all sides. We now begin the detailed scrutiny to seek to improve the Bill and to see just how far the Government are willing to move, if at all, to deliver a better deal for the British people and, crucially, for the Chagossians.

My Amendment 1 would put a clear statement of the Bill’s purposes on the face of the Bill. In essence, it is a clear and faithful description of the effects of the provisions of the Bill. It delivers clarity. The Bill does cede sovereignty over the islands, seek to dissolve the British Indian Ocean Territory after 200 years, provide for the continued British administration of Diego Garcia and limit the citizenship rights of the Chagossians.

Strangely, the Bill is completely silent on who shall have sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago in the future, which is against the precedent set in previous Bills where territory has been conceded. By bringing this Bill, the Government are saying that presumably all these changes are good things that they are justly proud of. I therefore see no reason why the Government should resist this amendment on the grounds of fact. The Minister always seeks to be constructive in her work in your Lordships’ House, so I am sure she would not resist an amendment that delivers essential legislative clarity simply for the sake of delivering an unamended Bill at the end of the scrutiny process.

Against this context, should the Government oppose my amendment we will be led to assume that the Government are in fact embarrassed by the reality of their legislation being set out in simple terms. If they are indeed proud of the Bill, they will have no cause to be embarrassed and should accept the amendment.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Given that the Bill is to give effect to the treaty, I wonder whether the noble Lord could say a little more, because in introducing his amendment he did not, about how his amendment interacts with Article 1 of the treaty that Parliament has ratified?

Well, the Government have said on a number of occasions that ratification does not come into effect until this legislation comes into effect.

It has been ratified; Parliament has ratified the treaty. It has not been brought into effect, but the treaty, which states that Mauritius is sovereign, has been ratified by Parliament. That is the treaty that the United Kingdom has entered into, and which Parliament has ratified. What is the interaction between that and proposed new subsection (2) of the noble Lord’s amendment, which says:

“Nothing in this Act grants … that Mauritius has sovereignty”?

He is seeking to have an amendment to a Bill which overrides a treaty commitment that Parliament has ratified, is he not?

It is a statement of fact that this legislation gives up British sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, but it does not say who should have sovereignty—the treaty is a separate matter. The treaty cannot come into effect until the legislation is approved, as I said.

The noble Lord is just factually wrong. The treaty has been ratified—it is now a treaty. His amendment is seeking to alter the treaty. Article 1 of the treaty, which Parliament has ratified, says that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago in its entirety, including Diego Garcia. Is he seeking for Parliament now to try to change the treaty which it has ratified?

I am saying that we have every right to oppose this legislation. The legislation has come as a result of the treaty that the Government have agreed. We opposed the treaty; we think it is unnecessary. We also oppose the legislation, and we are entitled to table amendments to it because, as the Government have stated, the treaty cannot legally come into effect until the legislation is approved. I beg to move.

My Lords, Amendments 8 and 9 are in my name. Amendment 8 says that the treaty shall not come into force until a binding case in an international court requires us to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Amendment 9 requires the Government to spell out their legal position on why they believe such a ruling to be possible, let alone likely.

The whole basis of the Government’s case is that

“without this deal … within weeks we could face losing legal rulings, and within just a few years the base would become inoperable”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/25; col. 1284.]

At Second Reading, the possibility of such a ruling was contested not just by me but by several other noble Lords, on the basis that there is no international court which can rule against our sovereignty in this way. Yet Ministers failed to address that issue and those arguments. Even noble Lords who have held the highest office in the FCDO—mandarins of our diplomatic corps who tenaciously defended this deal—failed to answer or address the question of which court could reach a binding judgment against us.

First, everyone acknowledges that the ruling of the International Court of Justice was purely advisory and not binding on us. Secondly, it was based on resolutions of the UN General Assembly which themselves are not legally binding; nor have they ever been endorsed by the Security Council. Thirdly, when Britain signed up to the ICJ, it specifically precluded disputes between the UK and present or past members of the Commonwealth. So the ruling was triply non-binding, and the ECJ cannot rule against us on this in future because it is a dispute with a Commonwealth country.

Ministers have chosen to ignore these arguments and not dispute them, although it is not clear that they were aware of this situation when they plunged into these negotiations. I rather suspect they were not. They have tacitly acknowledged the truth of these arguments by moving on to assert that the tribunal of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea could rule against Britain and in favour of Mauritius on the issue of sovereignty. As the noble Lord, Lord Murray, spelled out in forensic detail, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has no such power. Britain has invoked Article 298 of the convention, which excludes military matters, so it is outside its wherewithal.

How far back is the noble Lord going to go in his historic examination of British Governments? Is his position that the British Government should never ever cede sovereignty to any former colony? I am thinking of Australia, South Africa or Canada. How far is he going back in saying that it is absolutely wrong to cede sovereignty?

If the noble Lord wants me to go back further, I think it is a shame that we did not follow the advice of Edmund Burke and reach an agreement with the American colonists to give them independence earlier on.

But we are not talking about giving independence to the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands; we are talking about giving the Chagos Islands to a country which has never ruled them and is 2,000 kilometres away. To do that simply on the basis of long-standing Foreign Office doctrine is, surely, unwise. I hope your Lordships’ House will consider seriously these amendments because, if they are passed, we will know once and for all whether the Government have a strong case or not. If they are rejected, we can be certain that they do not have a strong case for giving away these islands.

Before the noble Lord sits down, I wonder if he could correct some remarks he has been making about people he has given a Chinese name to. I am not quite sure why he thinks that that is so telling. The arguments advanced were drawn from the testimony of Sir Christopher Greenwood, a former British member of the International Court of Justice. If he read his testimony—which, of course, is all available in the report from the International Agreements Committee of this House, which is being totally ignored by him and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan —he would see what the case is, which was set out very fully. It was set out not by the FCDO but by Sir Christopher Greenwood.

I am certainly very happy to mention that the noble Lord himself mentioned Sir Christoper Greenwood’s testimony in his speech, but his primary reasoning was that we should accept even purely advisory rulings of foreign courts in order that we be able better to uphold the rules-based international order. I remind him that the chairman of the committee that heard that evidence said in the debate that, although the committee was divided on the evidence it heard, he was inclined to agree with the arguments I had put forward.

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 1 by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I take it that he was not entirely serious when he dreamt up this particular innovation, which is right at the start of the Bill, whereby the purpose of the Bill should be presented in the way that the opponents of the Bill would find most attractive. It is a novel constitutional idea. In his reasons for the purposes of the Act, he has included only things that obviously he agrees with, but he has not included, for example, that this will secure the base for the UK and the USA for the next hundred years. There are arguments for and against, as there with any piece of legislation, but to think that you should state at the beginning of a Bill that the purpose of the legislation is what the Opposition would like to see enacted is novel. The only parallel I can think of would be if the sundry privatisation measures that were passed by the Thatcher Government had said, “The purpose of this Act is to sell off at knock-down prices the assets of the British people”. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, would have been in favour of that kind of constraint when that legislation was going through. I do not take this as a serious amendment, and I am sure he will not press it to a vote—it might be fun if he did, but we will see anyway.

One part of the noble Lord’s proposed new clause that is contentious—well, a lot of it is contentious—on which I would certainly like to hear more from my noble friends on the Front Bench is paragraph (d), which suggests that the Bill will

“limit the citizenship rights of the Chagossians”.

I do not think the Bill as it stands does that, and I want to be clear about that, but I think it raises an issue which we will come to later in the Bill, which is of concern to a number of us here, about what further rights for the Chagossians are appropriate, given the appalling way in which—we are all agreed—they were treated when they were basically thrown out of their own island.