A High Court judge made a dramatic eleventh-hour intervention to prevent the United Kingdom giving away its strategically vital territory in the Indian Ocean, islands which contain a major U.S. airbase.
UPDATE 1400 — Legal Challenge Overturned
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Prime Minister Keir Starmer had been due to sign over the British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Islands, an archipelago of around 1,000 volcanic islands, including Diego Garcia, which is home to a U.S. Air Base. Yet at the very last moment, a High Court Judge ruled at 02:30 BST on Thursday morning that the handover should be suspended pending a legal challenge.
Mr Justice Goose ordered a “stay of action”, reports The Daily Telegraph, instructing the United Kingdom government that it shall “take no conclusive or legally binding step to conclude its negotiations concerning the possible transfer of the British Indian Ocean Territory (also known as the Chagos Archipelago) to a foreign government”.
The case, which was brought by a Diego Garcia native against giving control of the islands away to Mauritius, will be further heard on Thursday. If it goes through, under the terms of the deal the British government will give the islands to Mauritius, and then sign a 99-year lease to continue to use them for military purposes.
As previously reported, the cost of this is likely to run into several billion pounds. Brexit leader Nigel Farage has said over the course of the lease, the deal will cost British taxpayers £52 billion to lease land the government already — for now — owns. Also of concern is claims that Mauritius is growing closer to countries like China, and like Britain’s handover of Hong Kong in 1997, any agreements made today won’t be observed in the long-run.
The British government stuck to its stock line that giving away sovereign British territory, which contains one of the world’s most strategically important U.S. air and naval bases, and paying a foreign government that has never controlled the islands before for the pleasure, is “the right thing to protect the British people and our national security”.
Why this is the case has never actually been adequately explained, with the government stating it believes not paying to give the islands away now could mean an international court could somehow compel the UK to give up the land with a court ruling in the future, even though there is no world police to enforce such an action. This hazy reasoning, which the government has further defended on national security grounds, has left an open space for speculation to form, including that the Prime Minister — who is a human rights lawyer — is mentally captured by the importance of ‘international law’ and puts its interests above that of the United Kingdom.
As previously reported of Diego Garcia:
The British Indian Ocean Territory (‘BIOT’), as the islands are presently called, apart from its very striking flag, is best known for hosting a strategically important military base on its largest island, Diego Garcia. The British had built an airbase operating against the Japanese on the island during the Second World War and U.S. Seabees build a new base in the 1970s to support long-range bombers and other aircraft. Beyond the military base, it is understood the island has also been used as a listening station to intercept radio traffic in the Indian Ocean and, possibly, as a “CIA black site.”
The announcement by the UK and Mauritius stated that the continued operation of the base is secured for an initial period of 99 years, assuming Mauritius keeps its word. The United Kingdom, of course, has not had good experiences in the recent past with promises exacted from new territorial masters of strategically valuable islands surrendered by choice in the Eastern hemisphere, but these lessons appear to have been put aside for expedience.
And of the reaction by Trump allies to the UK deal:
Kennedy said: “I’ve talked to President Trump about this, and I’ve talked to Marco Rubio about this, our esteemed new Secretary of State. And I’m hoping they are going to do something about it. The United Nations has no jurisdiction over the United Kingdom or us, America, and this is our military base… We need to stop this deal.
President Trump and and Secretary Rubio need to pick up the phone and and call Prime Minister Starmer in the United Kingdom and say to to the Prime Minister: ‘Mr Prime Minister with all due respect stop dipping into your ketamine stash! Put down the bong. We need this military base to combat China. Don’t do it.”
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