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LIT-1589: Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965

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StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1361) in full, from the UN's official copy of the opinion, A/73/773 (the Court's own PDF returned a Cloudflare 403); worth reading as the Court's holding that a colony's consent to its own partition, given under the administering Power's authority, is not the free will of its people, so that Mauritius's decolonization was not lawfully completed and the UK's administration of the Chagos is a continuing wrongful act. Read it knowing that it is advisory, that its 'people' is the people of the whole colony of Mauritius, not the Chagossians, and that it leaves their return to the General Assembly in one sentence (para. 181) with no operative point; the separate opinions and dissent were not read.
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ReportsCASE-169 — The Chagossians, 1965 to now: a people expelled from the Chagos Archipelago between 1967 and 1973 for the Diego Garcia base, dispersed to Mauritius, the Seychelles and Britain, whose practices, kinship and political organization continued or arose in exile while sovereignty over the islands was settled between states
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1361 — International Court of Justice — Chagos advisory opinion

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International Court of Justice (2019). Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965, Advisory Opinion of 25 February 2019.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1361), from UN document A/73/773; the separate opinions were not read.

Why this is here

A3 used it to separate interstate sovereignty from the claims of the displaced, the distinction CASE-169 brings to CLAIM-348: a settlement adequate to the dispute between states need not decide whether the people expelled can return.

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