Mauritius brought proceedings against the Maldives to determine their maritime boundaries under the compulsory dispute settlement process in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). But London still maintains that it has sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago despite the ICJ opinion.ĭiego Garcia, Chagos Archipelago, home to a US military base on a leasing arrangement with the United Kingdom ( NASA Johnson/Flickr) In 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion in which it determined that the decolonisation of Mauritius was not lawfully completed with the separation of the Chagos Archipelago and that the United Kingdom was obliged to end its administration of the islands as rapidly as possible. Diego Garcia, the largest island within the Chagos Archipelago, was then leased to the United States for use as a military base. The case again brought the issue of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago into the spotlight because the maritime claims of the Maldives and Mauritius can only overlap if the Chagos Archipelago belongs to Mauritius.īritain detached the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius at the time of its independence with the promise that it would be returned to Mauritius when it no longer required it. Mauritius brought proceedings against the Maldives in 2019 to delimit the maritime boundary between the Chagos Archipelago and the southernmost atoll of the Maldives.
More broadly, it reflects an emerging trend in the judicial resolution of international maritime boundary disputes in the Indian Ocean.
First, it represents the latest judicial victory for Mauritius in its efforts to reclaim the Chagos Archipelago.
The decision last month of a Special Chamber of the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea on a maritime boundary dispute between Mauritius and the Maldives reflects two dimensions to the engagement by international courts in resolving disputes among Indian Ocean states.
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