Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdulla Shahid has stated Maldives voted against the call for the UK to hand over control of the Chagos islands to Mauritius, at Wednesday's United Nations vote, to protect Maldives' interests in the matter. He explained Maldives was concerned over how a change in control of Chagos Islands, could compromise interests of Maldives in that area, with regard to the country's marine border.
Maldives was one of the few countries that voted against Mauritius, alongside the UK, Australia, Hungary, Israel and the US. A total of 116 countries voted in favour of a non-binding resolution presented by African countries that urged Britain to withdraw its colonial administration from the Chagos Islands within six months. 56 others abstained, including Canada, France and Germany.
In July 2010, the Government of the Maldives submitted a unilateral claim for a continental shelf with coordinates overlapping both the British and the Mauritian claims of a 200-mile zone in the Chagos Archipelago, prompting a diplomatic protest by the UK on August 20, 2010, followed in turn by formal objections from Mauritius against the British counter-claim and the submission of Maldives. Consideration of the disputed claims has been deferred for the time being, according to an interim decision by the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS).
Foreign Minister Shahid stressed the vote was in no way meant to appease either the UK, the US or Israel. He added had it been Maldives alone that voted against Mauritius at the vote, the government would not have faltered.
The Chagos archipelago has been at the centre of a decades-long dispute over Britain's decision to separate it from Mauritius in 1965 and set up a joint military base with the US on Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands. Britain evicted about 2,000 people from the archipelago in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for a huge US military base on Diego Garcia, which played a key strategic role in the Cold War before being used as a staging ground for US bombing campaigns against Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.
In February, the International Court of Justice handed Mauritius a victory when it said in a legal opinion that UK had illegally split the islands and should give up control of the Chagos. After Britain rejected the ruling, Mauritius turned to the United Nations General Assembly to press for action. Mauritius argues the Chagos archipelago was part of its territory since at least the 18th century and was taken unlawfully by the UK in 1965, three years before the island nation gained independence. However, UK insists it has sovereignty over the archipelago, which it calls the British Indian Ocean Territory.
The vote was the second time in two years UK had to defend its ownership of the Chagos Islands at the United Nations.