Negotiations on Chagos Islands' sovereignty face legal challenge | The Guardian |

Three years before independence, the UK severed the Chagos Islands from the rest of Mauritius so it could lease Diego Garcia to the US for military use. [renamed "Camp Justice"]

The British government then forcibly deported 2,000 Chagossians. A newly published book by the barrister and historian Philippe Sands KC, The Last Colony, chronicles how the British shut down the islands' plantations and cut off food supplies, with families told they had no option but to leave by ship by 27 April 1973 or slowly starve.

An arduous legal dispute has been waged by those seeking the right to return to the islands, culminating in a 2019 ruling by the international court of justice that the continuing British occupation of the islands was illegal.

Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 | ICJ - The Hague |

'Sapere aude'