Mauritian Attorney General under fire for misrepresenting Chagos court ruling

Court struck down decades-old legal barrier to right of abode and quashed removals — so why is the Mauritian Attorney General omitting key facts?

The landmark judgment delivered this week in the Chagos Islands case should have brought clarity to one of the most contentious legal disputes of recent decades. Instead, it is already being publicly framed in a way that strips out its most significant finding.

The Mauritian Attorney General, Gavin Glover, has claimed that the ruling does not grant the Chagossians any right to remain on the islands, emphasising that those currently present, including First Minister Misley Mandarin, entered without permits and therefore remain there unlawfully. In media interviews, he has gone further, stating that “it is not true to say they have a right to remain on the island,” presenting the judgment as leaving their position essentially unchanged.

In separate remarks, Mr Glover has also described the arrival of British Chagossians on the islands as “illegal,” reinforcing a narrative centred on permit breaches and technical non-compliance. Yet his public statements do not engage with the Court’s central findings on right of abode, heritage rights, or the broader legal context of resettlement. The effect is to frame the issue almost entirely as one of alleged illegality, while leaving unaddressed the central question raised by the judgment: whether the continued exclusion of the Chagossian people from their homeland can be sustained in law.

That characterisation does not reflect the substance of what the Court decided. Because this case was not about permits. It was about whether the legal architecture used for decades to exclude the Chagossian people from their homeland could lawfully continue.

On that question, the Court’s answer was decisive. It struck down Section 9 of the British Indian Ocean Territory Constitution Order 2004, the provision stating that “no person has the right of abode in the Territory.” The judge held that provision to be unlawful, irrational, and incapable of standing. It has been quashed.

That clause was the legal foundation of the Chagossians’ exclusion. It is now gone. This is not a peripheral point. It is the core of the judgment. Yet it is absent from the Attorney General’s account.

Instead, the focus has been directed toward the narrowest possible issue, the absence of permits, as though the case turned on administrative compliance rather than the lawfulness of exclusion itself. It did not.

The Court also quashed the removal notices issued to the Chagossians, finding that they were imposed without fair process, without proper consideration, and without adequate reasons. It ordered that any future decisions must be retaken lawfully, taking into account all relevant circumstances, including heritage rights and any entitlement to a right of abode.

This represents a fundamental shift in the legal position. For more than twenty years, the law operated on the basis that no right of abode existed. That position has now been declared unlawful. To present the judgment as if it leaves the status quo intact is not supported by the ruling itself.

And the implications are profound. Because this case is not about paperwork. It is about whether a people who were removed from their homeland can continue to be excluded under a legal framework that the Court has now dismantled. The Court’s answer is clear. They cannot.

At a time when the future of the Chagos Islands is the subject of intense political negotiation, the accurate representation of this judgment is not a matter of nuance. It is essential.

The legal position is now fundamentally different. The provision denying a right of abode has been quashed. The removal orders have been set aside. And future decisions must now engage properly with the rights and status of the Chagossian people.

That is what the Court has said. Anything less is not a full account of the judgment.

Gavin Glover should correct the record.

By Claire Bullivant