UK’s Chagos deal fails to guarantee rights: UN experts

GENEVA: Britain´s deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius fails to guarantee the rights of the Chagossian people, a group of United Nations experts said on Tuesday.

The agreement announced last month maintains British and US control of a key military base on the Indian Ocean archipelago´s largest island, Diego Garcia. The deal will see Britain pay Mauritius £101 million ($137 million) annually for 99 years to lease the facility.

As part of the agreement, Mauritius will be able to resettle Chagossian islanders, expelled from the archipelago by Britain in the 1960s, to all of its more than 50 islands, apart from Diego Garcia.

“By maintaining a foreign military presence of the United Kingdom and the United States on Diego Garcia and preventing the Chagossian people from returning to Diego Garcia, the agreement appears to be at variance with the Chagossians´ right to return,” the UN experts said in a joint statement.

It also “hinders their ability to exercise their cultural rights in accessing their ancestral lands from which they were expelled”, they added. The statement was penned by the UN special rapporteurs on minority issues, on contemporary racism, and on reparation, plus the chair of the working group of experts on people of African descent. UN experts are appointed by the Human Rights Council to report their findings. They are independent figures and therefore do not speak for the United Nations itself.