Attorney General Ahmed Usham has stated that the government is seeking foreign expert advise over the United Kingdom's decision to handover the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, while the Maldives navigates a maritime boundary dispute over the archipelago.

Speaking at a press conference at the President's Office today, Usham said the government was seeking the advice of international experts on how the Maldives should react to the UK's decision to hand over the Chagos to Mauritius.

“This is a matter of getting the opinion of international experts and we have to change our strategies and ways of going forward with every development,” Usham said.

The British-occupied Chagos Archipelago has been agreed to be given to Mauritius after negotiations between the two countries.

Under the agreement, the US military base in Diego Garcia will be operated for the next 99 years. The military base was also very important for the British.

The UK, which has controlled the region since 1814, detached the Chagos Islands in 1965 from Mauritius – a former colony that became independent three years later – to create the British Indian Ocean Territory.

In the early 1970s, it evicted about 1,500 residents to Mauritius and the Seychelles to make way for an airbase on the largest island, Diego Garcia, which it had leased to the US in 1966 in return for a $14m discount on Polaris missiles.

Mauritius won back sovereignty in 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issuing an advisory opinion that the UK should give up control of the islands, saying it had wrongfully forced the population to leave in the 1970s to make way for the US airbase.

On 28 April 2021, a Special Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea handed down judgment in the merits phase of Dispute concerning delimitation of the maritime boundary between Mauritius and Maldives in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius/Maldives).

In these proceedings, Mauritius sought delimitation of a maritime boundary between the Chagos Archipelago and the Maldives pursuant to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (“UNCLOS”). The Maldives had previously raised preliminary objections to the claim, which were dismissed in a judgment dated 28 January 2021.

The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) however ruled in favor of the Maldives where the country's claim for a larger share of the disputed waters with Mauritius will be upheld.