This week, the government will try to push its draft deal to surrender the Chagos Islands through Parliament. There are many, many reasons why the deal is bad – from security, to the legitimate rights of the Chagossians, to the fact that the legal basis on which it is constructed is bunk. But there is another reason why the Chagos deal should be canned: it will be a catastrophe for the world’s environment.
Currently, the Chagos are protected by one of the world’s largest and strictest marine protected areas, in which all fishing is forbidden. An initiative of the last Labour government, the Marine Protected Area (MPA) has safeguarded one of the world’s most important natural environments, in which hundreds of animal and coral species exist away from human interference. This will be swept away under the deal, as I explain in my report for Policy Exchange.
Instead, Mauritius has promised to create its own MPA. This sounds good on paper; but unlike the British MPA, it will be legal to fish in all but a tiny sliver of the Mauritian MPA. In other words, far from protecting the environment, Mauritius is planning to open the Chagos’s well-preserved waters to exploitation.
Mauritius promises that the fishing will be done in a sustainable manner. But coming from a country with a terrible record on environmental protection – it ranks dead last when it comes to the ‘stringency of marine protected areas,’ according to a study by researchers at Yale University’s Center for Environmental Law & Policy – this promise is hard to credit.
Even if Mauritius was actually sincere in its expressed wish to protect the Chagos’s environment, it is not obvious how it will be able to do it. Mauritius doesn’t have a navy. It has two ships that are capable of reaching the Chagos and coming back to Mauritius. These are manned by a coastguard which has been censored by a government inquiry for being unable to monitor the waters around Mauritius, never mind the waters of islands several thousands of kilometres away from Port Louis.
Under the draft agreement’s bizarre logic, the United Kingdom has an obligation to help Mauritius to establish an MPA, but Mauritius has no obligation to create said MPA. If Mauritius does not establish an MPA, the UK has no legal recourse against Mauritius. It is only one of the many ways in which the agreement is entirely in favour of Mauritius to the detriment of Britain’s core interests.
Notably, though the UK agrees to pay Mauritius exorbitant amounts of public money to rent Diego Garcia, home to the American military base, Mauritius isn’t required to spend any of it on protecting the Chagos’s environment. Instead, the Mauritius government will use the money to abolish income tax for most of the country’s inhabitants.
There are many strategic, political, legal, and environmental reasons why the Chagos deal is one of the defining issues of this Parliament. It is striking how little attention has been accorded to the environmental dimension of the deal under this government with its own very particular value system.
