The Latest Breaking News from Chagos

Britain and Mauritius have begun talks aimed at ending a decades-old spat over the legal status of the Chagos Islands, whose population was forcibly cleared in the late 1960s to allow the building of a joint UK-US military installation.

Britain is on the cusp of decolonising Mauritius – again. The first attempt at decolonisation took place in 1968 but went unfulfilled when London kept hold of an island group that had long been regarded as Mauritian territory: the Chagos Archipelago.

Foreign secretary indicates major reversal of policy that could allow return of people expelled by Britain in 1970s

Home Office announces applications for children of those forcibly evicted by the British in 1970s will open in November

The distinctive songs of rare pygmy blue whales have been picked up by underwater nuclear bomb detectors.

When Olivier Bancoult, Liseby Elysé, Suzelle Baptiste, Rosemonde Bertin and Marcel Humbert set off on the Bleu de Nîmes for the Chagos archipelago in February 2022, it marked the first time exiled Chagos Islanders had returned without UK officials. On the surface, the expedition was both scientific (to survey Blenheim…

On 15 February 2022 the Mauritian flag was raised on two Indian Ocean atolls, Peros Banos and Salomon, both belonging to the Chagos archipelago. This was the first time that Mauritius’ flag was raised in the Chagos Islands, even though there is clear evidence that these 60 islands form part…

'The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours.... There will be no indigenous population except seagulls," wrote Sir Paul Gore-Booth, a senior official at the British Foreign Office, as the plan to expel the 2,000 Chagos Islanders from their homes was taking shape in…

A superyacht hired by Mauritius recently set out to conduct a scientific survey of the Blenheim reef, 230km off the coast of Diego Garcia in the Chagos archipelago. A group of Chagossians accompanied the scientists in what has been hailed as an “historic” event by Mauritian prime minister Pravind Jugnauth.

The decolonisation of Mauritius was never fully completed. This is because, in 1965, the British government put islands belonging to Mauritius into a new colonial jurisdiction, the British Indian Ocean Territory, which still exists today. It is long past time for this colonial-era wrongdoing to be made right, and for…

Between 1968 to 1973 the UK deported islanders to make way for a US Air base and 3,000 settled in Crawley, West Sussex but now risk being deported because they were not born in the UK