Starmer can sign Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius after judge rejects legal challenge

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius can now go ahead, a judge has ruled.

The development comes after a judge had granted an emergency injunction blocking the deal in the early hours of Thursday.

However, a high court judge has now done away with the injunction and said the deal could go ahead. The deal is expected to be signed virtually later in the day.

Under the deal, the United Kingdom will cede sovereignty over Chagos Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius. The deal will also grant the UK the island of Diego Garcia on a 99-year-lease. The Diego Garcia is the largest island in the archipelago and houses a highly strategic UK-US military base.

The deal has been controversial in the UK with the Conservative Party and Reform UK in the Opposition slamming the deal. Dame Priti Patel, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, has dubbed the deal an “epic failure of diplomacy” and “economically illiterate”.

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What is in the UK-Mauritius Chagos Islands deal?

While the terms of the deal have not been disclosed, it has been reported that the deal would cost the UK up to £90 million a year and around £9 billion overall for the 99-year period. There were also reports that Starmer had agreed to adjust the annual lease payment for inflation which would increase the annual payment and hence the overall cost of the deal by up to hundreds of millions.

Moreover, Mauritius has also secured a package of development funding and a new scheme to help the return of the natives to the Chagos Islands, who were displaced from the islands in the 1960s, according to The Daily Telegraph.

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The negotiations with Mauritius were started by the previous Conservative Party’s government and were triggered by a 2019 judgement of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) granting the islands’ sovereignty to Mauritius.

A necessity or a strategic blunder?

While the ICJ has no enforcement powers, Starmer has maintained that the only way to continue operating the Diego Garcia base was to cede the sovereignty to Mauritius and secure the island’s legal lease.

To operate the Diego Garcia military base securely, the British and US militaries require access to military communication satellites and the British Prime Minister's Office (PMO) has said that access to those satellites could not be ensured without a deal with Mauritius.

The PMO in February said that “the electromagnetic spectrum at the Diego Garcia base would not be able to continue to operate without a deal”.

The PMO further said, “This system enables secure communications in the region. It’s something that the UK and the US have currently got unique access to, and it is the case that without legal certainty over the base (it) is something we would lose access to.”

While the US and British governments have complete, unrestricted control to electromagnetic spectrum at the Diego Garcia military base on the islands, that would not be certain if an international court were to declare such control illegal as per international law, according to Bloomberg.

As the global satellite communication is governed by International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and ICJ have already ruled against the UK, there is a possibility that the ITU could also act against the UK in the matter. An adverse ruling at the ITU regarding satellite communication would have consequences for defence and technology companies involved in the operation of the satellites and also erode the exclusive control over the spectrum that US and British militaries currently have there, according to Starmer’s government’s rationale.

While US President Donald Trump is onboard with the rationale and the terms of the deal, the Conservative Party and Reform UK are not — Trump’s approval was a must for the deal to go ahead as the UK operates the Diego Garcia base jointly with the United States.

With the Chagos Islands deal, Starmer “is still putting his Leftie shame of our country’s history over our national security, and our longstanding relationship with our closest ally”, said Dame Priti, the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

Patel further said, “At a time when public spending is under serious pressure, they are also signing up to spend billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money leasing back a site that is currently under our sovereignty. And to add insult to injury, they are doing all this in secret, with Labour ministers keep refusing to explain the details to Parliament and the British public. They must urgently come clean on what exactly this surrender is going to cost us.”