Former British colony Mauritius has challenged at the World Court the legality of the United Kingdom’s claim to its Chagos Islands, which now host the key US military base of Diego Garcia.
Mauritius’ former president Anerood Jugnauth took the case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Monday, arguing that the country had been deceitfully pressured to relinquish control of Chagos during post-independence negotiations with their British colonizers and that it had only agreed to temporary use of the islands for military objectives.
The UK detached the Chagos Islands from its then-colony of Mauritius in 1965, three years prior to offering it independence, but continued to keep the sparsely-populated archipelago part of the British overseas territories.
The US leased the Chagos Islands’ biggest island, Diego Garcia, from the UK in 1966 and constructed a major air base there after forcing its entire population of nearly…