Muizzu’s Maldives cooks up a sovereignty dispute over the Chagos Islands

The deserted island of Île du Coin, in the Peros Banhos atoll of the Chagos Islands, is not often in the news. Yet in mid-February, it made headlines after six Chagossians landed there, intending to set up a permanent home. Misley Mandarin, the Mauritius-born leader of the small group, said that his father, who had accompanied him, had been displaced from Île du Coin when he was 14 years old. “I am not in exile any more. This is my homeland,” he said as they set up tents, expressing their desire for more to join them. The Chagossians were aiming to throw a wrench in the works of a planned handover of the Chagos archipelago from the United Kingdom, which presently controls what is officially British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), to Mauritius, which claims sovereignty over the islands.

On 31 March, in a landmark verdict, a judge from the BIOT ruled that Chagossians, who had been expelled in their entirety from the archipelago by the United Kingdom in the 1960s, had a legal right to live on the islands. Justice James Lewis said the United Kingdom’s previous claims that the islanders could not move back due to security concerns related to a joint US-UK military base on the island of Diego Garcia no longer held as the UK government planned to hand the islands over to Mauritius. He also calculated that the cost of the Mauritius handover deal to the UK taxpayer, coming to GBP 51 billion, meant arguments claiming that it was too expensive to allow the return of Chagossians were now invalidated.

In looking to stall the handover, the Chagossians had an unlikely ally. Days after the Chagossians set up camp on Île du Coin, the British politician Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, secretly travelled to Addu, the southernmost atoll in the Maldives, which lies some 500 kilometres from the Peros Banhos. He claimed he was there to transport aid to the Chagossians on Peros Banhos, who are also British citizens, and that he was prevented from doing so by British authorities. Standing on the pristine Addu shoreline, Farage expressed dismay that the United Kingdom was handing the Chagos archipelago over to Mauritius after years of international pressure had resulted in a bilateral treaty to this effect. Reports later surfaced that Reform UK donors had funded the Chagossians’ journey, helping fly the group to Sri Lanka, from where they had set sail.

Reform UK had long sought a way to block the deal, when the US-Israeli war on Iran in West Asia offered an unexpected opportunity to thwart the treaty’s looming ratification. When the United Kingdom initially refused to allow the United States to launch a pre-emptive attack on Tehran from the Diego Garcia base, the US president, Donald Trump, also turned on the deal. In a social media post just days before the war began, Trump hectored UK prime minister, Keir Starmer: “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA”. On 11 April, it was reported that the UK-Mauritius deal had been shelved.

Taking advantage of these rapid shifts, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, is now staking a Maldivian claim to the archipelago. In January 2026, Muizzu had written to the United Kingdom to formally object to the UK-Mauritius deal, citing “profound historical and administrative ties” between the Maldives and Chagos Islands, including gravestones inscribed in Dhivehi, folk stories and a 16th-century patent from a Maldivian king asserting sovereignty over them. The previous month, in a phone call with the UK deputy prime minister, David Lammy, Muizzu had said that “any transfer of the archipelago must account for Maldivian interests.” Under Muizzu’s predecessor in office, Ibrahim Solih, the Maldives had recognised the Mauritian claim to the islands, but now, as Trump and Farage railed against the Chagos deal, Muizzu withdrew this, spying a chance to insert his country into a debate about sovereignty, influence and economic spoils in what he sees as the Maldives’ backyard. Muizzu sent patrol boats into waters south of Addu, in defiance of a 2023 ruling by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) that had demarcated contested territory between Mauritius and the Maldives. This resulted in Mauritius suspending diplomatic relations with the Maldives.