Britain suspends deal to transfer Chagos Islands to Mauritius after Trump didnʼt support it

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has shelved a deal to hand over the Chagos Archipelago, home to a joint British-American military base, to Mauritius. The US President Donald Trump has opposed the deal, despite previously supporting it.

This is reported by the BBC and the Associated Press.

UK government officials have said they are not completely abandoning the deal, but they have run out of time to pass the relevant legislation by the end of this session.

It is also expected that the relevant bill will not be included in the list of bills that King Charles III will announce at the opening of the next session on May 13. This means that it is not a priority for the next year of parliament.

The agreement sees Britain hand over sovereignty over the territory to Mauritius and pay an average of $136 million a year to rent a joint British-American military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The base has been involved in US military operations from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, and has also been a base for US bombers in the US-Israeli war against Iran.

What is happening around the Chagos Islands?

Mauritius had been a British colony since 1810, and in 1814 it also took possession of the Chagos Archipelago. In 1965, before Mauritius gained independence, Great Britain separated the Chagos Islands from it and left them under its administration, calling them the British Indian Ocean Territory.

After that, the British authorities forcibly evicted almost 2 000 residents to Mauritius and the Seychelles to make way for an air base on the largest island of the archipelago, Diego Garcia, which was later leased to the United States.

In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius during decolonization violated international law. That same year, the UN General Assembly called on Britain to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

Negotiations to transfer the islands to Mauritius began in 2022 under the previous Conservative government and resumed after the election of Starmerʼs Labour Party in July 2024.

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