Human Rights and the Chagos Advisory Opinion

The Advisory Opinion rendered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 case1 constitutes a further piece of a complex jigsaw which we will refer to broadly as the Chagos case. It relates to a group of small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean (the Chagos Archipelago); its former inhabitants (the Chagossians); the United Kingdom, which today administers the Archipelago under the designation ‘British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)’; Mauritius, which claims the Archipelago as part of its own territory; the United States, which operates a military basis in Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Archipelago; and a number of other actors, including states like the Seychelles and the Maldives, and the African Union (AU).