Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Callanan Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 12th January 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Callanan]

At end insert “but that this House regrets that the UK-Mauritius Agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago including Diego Garcia does not secure the long-term future of the Diego Garcia Military Base, creates uncertainty over the continuing unrestricted use of the Military Base and imposes £35 billion of costs on UK taxpayers for which the Government has no mandate, and that the Government failed to consult the Chagossian people before signing the Treaty”.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, throughout our debates on the Bill, we have had, as the Minister said, many robust exchanges, and the Bill will go to the other place with four amendments passed by your Lordships’ House. However, it has become increasingly clear throughout those debates that this deal fails even on the terms set out for it by its ministerial proponents.

They have told us repeatedly that we need this deal to provide legal certainty—“Look at the advisory opinion by the ICJ”, they tell us. We are told that if we do not give away the islands then all sorts of unpleasant judgments might follow in various unspecified fora. My noble friend Lord Lilley has been forensic in questioning the Government on exactly where these adverse rulings might emanate, given that the ICJ itself would surely be excluded from any such decisions and that disputes involving the UK and Commonwealth countries were specifically excluded from its mandate when we first acceded to it. We have heard various mutterings about the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and even the International Telecommunication Union, but no definitive response. Therefore, we have an advisory ICJ opinion, from a panel containing Russian and Chinese judge—those doughty campaigners for the concept of international law, seemingly applying to everyone except themselves—and, with great seriousness, Ministers tell us that this opinion must be respected.

However, we now have an additional opinion from another UN body: the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which, ironically, contains Mauritius as a member. A few weeks ago, this committee published a formal decision calling for the suspension of treaty ratification. As far as I am aware, the Foreign Office has ignored it and is yet to even comment on the ruling. So we have two diametrically opposed opinions from different UN bodies, one of which is to be obeyed without hesitation while the other, apparently, is to be completely ignored.

Ministers then tell us that they have fully secured the future of the Diego Garcia base, which will be able to continue operations exactly as before. However, they have manifestly failed to explain how that can possibly be the case when Mauritius is a signatory to the Pelindaba treaty which prohibits the placing of any nuclear weapons on any African territory, which Diego Garcia would become under this deal. Nobody has been asking Ministers to disclose secret defence information, but we know from openly published sources that the base has been utilised for the transportation of nuclear weapons on planes and submarines. How can that possibly be compatible with Mauritius’s obligations under the Pelindaba treaty?

The agreement is completely silent on this matter. Even in the face of robust questioning from my noble friend Lady Goldie, a former Defence Minister, we have received no ministerial answers. If base operation is to continue unhindered, as Ministers tell us it will, we can only assume there exists some kind of secret agreement along the lines of the old disgraced US policy on gays in the military: don’t ask and don’t tell.

The current Mauritian Government might play along with this fiction, but what about any future Mauritian Governments? What about all the other African signatories to the treaty? Any one of them could also take action in the international courts to force Mauritius to abide by its treaty obligations. For an agreement supposedly predicated on providing both military and legal certainty, it seems destined to do the exact opposite.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I have clearly annoyed the noble Lord, given the finger-pointing this afternoon. My tone comes because this is the conclusion to these considerations. I would invite noble Lords to consider, when we talk about legal jeopardy and our reliance on third states, the remoteness of these islands and the complexity of sustaining a base of this nature. We rely on other states for supplies, for refuelling and for communications purposes. That is why we rest part of our argument on the need to resolve the legal jeopardy that the previous Government, as well as this Government and other states, could see existed here. We were determined to resolve this because, left unresolved, our position becomes weaker and weaker over time. This needed to be settled.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her replies. I do not think she said anything different from the points she made earlier. We had a lot of party-political insults but, yet again, no dealing with the actual issues that we raised. The one concession that I thought I heard from her—I will check Hansard—was an admission of what we have been saying all along: Mauritius does not in fact have the capabilities to resource the protection of the marine protected area. She has never said that in any previous assertions. Anyway, there are lots of points that I could take up more of the House’s time with, but I will not do that. I will just say that I would like to test the opinion of the House on my Motion.