A Headache of Its Own Making: ORF’s Misreading of Chagos, Law, and the Maldives

Editorial Note 

This article is published as a considered response to a recent commentary by Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy, carried by the Observer Research Foundation and first published by the Lowy Institute on 1 April 2026. It addresses a series of legal and historical claims presented therein which, in our view, mischaracterise the scope of international law and the status of competing claims over the Chagos Archipelago. The purpose of this response is not merely to rebut, but to clarify the applicable legal framework and restore analytical precision to a question that remains unsettled. The arguments advanced here are grounded in established principles of decolonisation, jurisdiction, and third-party rights. Readers are invited to consider both texts with care and in full.

Policy commentary on Chagos has developed a habit of presenting conclusions as though they were settled facts. The recent piece carried by ORF exemplifies this tendency. It offers a confident narrative of shifting Maldivian positions, Mauritian entitlement, and Indian strategic anxiety. What it does not offer is a faithful reading of law or history. That omission matters, because on Chagos, precision is not optional. It is decisive.

The claim that the Maldives has “shifted” its position is the article’s central premise, and it is incorrect. The Maldives has never, in any legally operative sense, recognised Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. What is being recast as a reversal is, in reality, a misinterpretation of proceedings before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. ITLOS does not determine sovereignty. Its jurisdiction, under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is limited to maritime disputes.¹

In the 2021 Mauritius–Maldives case, the Special Chamber did not adjudicate title over Chagos. It relied on a prior legal assumption drawn from the 2019 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.² That opinion, issued under Article 65 of the ICJ Statute, is advisory and non-binding in character.³ More importantly, it cannot determine the rights of states that were not before the Court. This reflects a settled principle of international law, articulated most clearly in the Monetary Gold doctrine, that the legal interests of a state cannot be adjudicated without its consent.⁴ The Maldives was not a party to those proceedings. Its legal position was neither tested nor extinguished.

The consequence is straightforward. No judicial or quasi-judicial body has rendered a binding determination that displaces Maldivian claims. Assertions to the contrary collapse once jurisdictional limits and third-party rights are properly understood.

The article’s suggestion that the Maldives “concurred” with Mauritian sovereignty suffers from the same flaw. Diplomatic posture is not legal recognition. States do not surrender sovereign positions through ambiguous alignment or procedural convenience. Recognition is explicit. It is formal. It is not inferred.⁵

A further source of confusion, and one the ORF piece leaves unexamined, lies in the treatment of the 2019 ICJ advisory opinion itself. The Court’s reasoning is not mysterious. It is anchored in the decolonisation framework reflected in UN General Assembly Resolution 2066, read together with paragraph 6 of Resolution 1514 (XV) and Principle VI of Resolution 1541 (XV), which prohibit the partial disruption of the territorial integrity of a non-self-governing territory during the process of decolonisation.⁶

What makes this episode almost ironic is that the very arrangement engineered by the United Kingdom, with the acquiescence of colonial Mauritius, proves self-defeating when tested against that standard. Chagos was administered as part of the colonial territory of Mauritius from Port Louis. Having treated it as an integral component of that administrative unit, the attempt to excise it in 1965, just before independence in 1968, runs directly against the principles it purported to operate within.

In simpler terms, one cannot first define a territory as whole for purposes of administration, and then selectively fragment it at the moment of decolonisation without consequence. That is precisely why the Court found the detachment unlawful. It was not because Chagos was being affirmed as an inherent sovereign possession of Mauritius in a deeper historical sense, but because the act of separation violated the requirement of territorial integrity within the colonial framework itself.⁷

This distinction matters. The advisory opinion answers a specific question. Was the detachment lawful within the process of decolonising Mauritius as it was then constituted. The answer is no. It does not answer a different and far more complex question. Was Chagos historically and originally part of Mauritius prior to colonial structuring. The Court was not seized of, nor did it adjudicate, competing claims of sovereign title beyond the colonial administrative framework.⁸ Accordingly, the question of underlying sovereign title remains legally open and cannot be resolved by reference to the advisory opinion alone.

And the logic is neither novel nor controversial. In Monetary Gold Removed from Rome in 1943, the Court declined to determine entitlement to gold held by multiple states because doing so required ruling on the rights of Albania, a state not before it.⁴ The same discipline applies here. Sovereignty cannot be conclusively allocated by excluding those whose legal interests are engaged. To do so would not be adjudication. It would be assertion.

To treat the former as if it conclusively resolves the latter is not legal reasoning. It is conflation.

Equally problematic is the attempt to portray Maldivian claims as a recent political invention. The Chagos Archipelago, known in Dhivehi historical memory as Foalhavahi, has long-standing connections to the Maldivian polity. These are reflected in navigational traditions, royal titles, and early European cartography that situate the southern atolls within a Maldivian sphere. Beyond cultural and navigational association, the Maldivian position engages recognised modes of territorial title in international law, including historical consolidation of authority and regional patterns of effective control, including longstanding patterns of navigation, administrative reach, and regional recognition that warrant examination under established doctrines of territorial title before any claim of exclusivity can be sustained.⁹

The portrayal of President Mohamed Muizzu as having engineered a sudden policy shift is therefore misplaced. What is described as a change is better understood as a reassertion of a position that was never legally abandoned. Diplomatic flexibility in earlier phases did not crystallise into a binding concession.

The article’s framing of India’s role as a strategic dilemma is similarly incomplete. India has long positioned itself as a leading voice in decolonisation, including through its role in the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization, where it served as the first Chair. Yet a key question was never confronted. Why did the United Kingdom omit the Maldives from reporting as a Non-Self-Governing Territory under Article 73(e) of the UN Charter?¹⁰

That omission shaped the documentary record within which later claims emerged. It narrowed the field of recognised territorial questions and allowed subsequent arguments to proceed on an incomplete foundation. Silence at that stage was not neutral. It had consequences that continue to reverberate.

The Maldives is not unaware of this history. It is fully conscious of how the record was constructed, and of the positions taken, or not taken, by regional actors at critical moments. Any assessment of leadership in the Indian Ocean must take that context seriously.

Against this backdrop, the suggestion that the Maldives presents a “headache” for India misidentifies the problem. The presence of overlapping claims is not a disruption. It is a reflection of unresolved legal and historical questions. The real test of regional leadership lies in engaging with those questions honestly, not in compressing them into a convenient narrative.

There is an evident irony in the argument advanced by ORF. By treating a contested question as though it were already resolved, it contributes to the very uncertainty it seeks to describe. Strategic clarity cannot be built on selective readings of law.

The Chagos question remains open. It sits at the intersection of decolonisation, maritime law, and competing historical claims. Any durable resolution will have to address each of these dimensions. Until that happens, assertions of finality are premature.

An unlawful detachment does not confer lawful title, and claims built on that confusion cannot settle sovereignty.

Footnotes 

1. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (adopted 10 December 1982, entered into force 16 November 1994) 1833 UNTS 3.
2. Dispute Concerning Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary between Mauritius and Maldives in the Indian Ocean (Mauritius v Maldives) (Preliminary Objections) ITLOS Case No 28, Judgment of 28 January 2021.
3. Statute of the International Court of Justice art 65.
4. Monetary Gold Removed from Rome in 1943 (Italy v France, United Kingdom and United States) (Preliminary Question) [1954] ICJ Rep 19.
5. James Crawford, Brownlie’s Principles of Public International Law (9th edn, OUP 2019) 219–223.
6. UNGA Res 1514 (XV) (14 December 1960) para 6; UNGA Res 1541 (XV) (15 December 1960) Principle VI; UNGA Res 2066 (XX) (16 December 1965).
7. Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 (Advisory Opinion) [2019] ICJ Rep 95, paras 160–174.
8. ibid paras 172–174.
9. Island of Palmas (Netherlands v United States) (1928) 2 RIAA 829; Malcolm N Shaw, International Law (9th edn, CUP 2021) 352–360.
10. Charter of the United Nations art 73(e).