Folhlhavai: The Maldives Must Decide What Case It Is Actually Making

A final maritime boundary judgment cannot simply be “reviewed”, while a claim to sovereignty over Folhlhavai (Chagos) demands an entirely different legal and diplomatic strategy

A written response from the Attorney General’s Office to RaajjeTV has brought an important uncertainty in the Government’s Folhlhavai (Chagos) policy back into focus. According to RaajjeTV, the Attorney General’s Office said that international experts have been appointed in relation to the Folhlhavai matter and that consultations with them are continuing. The Office indicated that the timeframe for proceeding further would become clearer after those consultations and that the matter would then move towards submission to an international court, yet it did not identify which court would hear the case. (RaajjeTV)

That omission matters more than it might first appear, because the Government has already taken a substantive position on Folhlhavai. President Dr Mohamed Muizzu has publicly stated that the Maldives possesses the most legitimate claim to the archipelago and that, if administration is transferred from the United Kingdom to another sovereign claimant, it should rightfully be vested in the Maldives. The President has pointed specifically to historical evidence, including the sixteenth century titulature and associated documentation of Sultan Hassan IX, as proof of the historical relationship between the Maldives and Folhlhavai.

Yet the Attorney General’s latest response leaves a fundamental question unanswered. What case is the Government actually preparing to take before an international court? Is it attempting to recover the maritime area affected by the 2023 judgment of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS)? Or is it asserting Maldivian sovereignty over Folhlhavai itself?

These are not two descriptions of the same dispute. They are fundamentally different claims, governed by different legal questions and requiring different strategies. Unless the Government distinguishes between them, there is a serious danger that the stronger territorial question will become subordinated to an attempt to reopen a maritime delimitation judgment that is, in principle, final.

There Is No Ordinary Appeal from the ITLOS Judgment

The first issue calls for some legal precision. On 28 April 2023, the Special Chamber of ITLOS delivered its judgment in the Dispute concerning Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary between Mauritius and Maldives in the Indian Ocean. The proceeding concerned the delimitation of overlapping maritime entitlements claimed by Mauritius and the Maldives. (ITLOS)

The Government now speaks of studying or reviewing that judgment and taking legal measures to recover the maritime territory it says the Maldives lost through the delimitation. But what precisely does “review” mean in this context? Under Article 33 of the Statute of ITLOS, judgments of the Tribunal are final, and ITLOS itself states unequivocally that its judgments are “final and without appeal.” There is therefore no appellate court to which the Maldives can simply take the 2023 delimitation case because a succeeding government considers the outcome wrong. (ITLOS: Interpretation and Revision of Judgments)

There is a procedure called revision, though it is emphatically not an appeal on the merits. Article 127 of the Rules of the Tribunal permits revision only upon discovery of a fact capable of being a decisive factor which, when judgment was delivered, was unknown both to the Tribunal and to the party requesting revision, provided that the party’s ignorance was not attributable to negligence. An application must also be brought within six months of discovering the new fact and within ten years of the judgment. (ITLOS Rules) That is an extraordinarily narrow doorway. A new government disagreeing with the litigation strategy of its predecessor is not a newly discovered fact. A different interpretation of history is not automatically a newly discovered fact either, and a subsequent change in national policy does not create an appellate jurisdiction that the ITLOS Statute simply does not provide.

If the Attorney General believes the requirements for revision are satisfied, the Government should say what newly discovered decisive fact is relied upon and how Article 127 can be engaged. If some other international proceeding is contemplated, the Government should identify its legal basis. The public deserves more than the word “review”.

The More Fundamental Question Is Sovereignty

The President’s declaration concerning Folhlhavai changes the character of the issue entirely. It is no longer merely an argument about where an exclusive economic zone boundary should have been drawn. It is an assertion concerning title to territory, and that distinction changes everything.

On 2 March 2026, the President’s Office officially stated that President Muizzu considers the Maldives to hold “the most legitimate claim” to the archipelago. The President cited a sixteenth century letter and map associated with Sultan Hassan IX and stated that Folhlhavai fell within the geographical boundaries of the Maldives at that time. He further stated that documentation would be prepared and submitted to relevant international authorities. (President’s Office)

Maritime delimitation determines the boundary between overlapping maritime entitlements of States. It does not determine historical sovereignty over the land from which those entitlements originate. The legal principle underlying the modern law of the sea is straightforward: the land dominates the sea. Sovereignty over land is the juridical source from which maritime entitlements arise.

If the Maldives maintains that Folhlhavai itself forms part of the historical territorial domain of the Maldives, then the logically anterior question is not how much sea Mauritius should receive north of Folhlhavai. It is whether Mauritius possesses the territorial title from which that maritime entitlement is claimed in the first place. That question was not adjudicated as a Maldives-Mauritius territorial sovereignty dispute in 2023, and nor did the International Court of Justice adjudicate a competing Maldivian title in its 2019 Advisory Opinion.

What the ICJ Actually Decided in 2019

This distinction matters because public discussion frequently treats the 2019 ICJ Advisory Opinion as though the Court had conducted an exhaustive historical adjudication of sovereignty over Folhlhavai against every possible claimant. It did not attempt anything of the kind.

The question placed before the Court concerned whether the decolonisation of Mauritius had been lawfully completed following Britain’s separation of the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 and the legal consequences arising from Britain’s continued administration. The Court expressly observed that the General Assembly had not submitted to it a bilateral sovereignty dispute between the United Kingdom and Mauritius, and its analysis was situated within the decolonisation framework specified by the General Assembly. (ICJ, Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965)

The Court concluded that the detachment of the archipelago from colonial Mauritius in 1965 was inconsistent with the applicable law of self-determination and that Mauritius’s decolonisation had consequently not been lawfully completed when it became independent in 1968. (ICJ Advisory Opinion) The General Assembly subsequently adopted Resolution 73/295 by 116 votes to six, with 56 abstentions, calling for implementation of the advisory opinion. The Maldives was one of the six States voting against the resolution. (United Nations)

None of this means that the 2019 Advisory Opinion can simply be ignored. It is a formidable legal obstacle that any Maldivian claim must confront seriously. But neither intellectual honesty nor international law permits an advisory opinion answering one question to be silently transformed into a judgment answering another question that was never placed before the Court. A Maldivian case would therefore have to ask a different historical and legal question: what was the territorial status of Folhlhavai before the British colonial arrangements upon which the later Mauritian claim depends? That is where the historical record becomes indispensable.

The Hassan IX Evidence Deserves International Examination

The Government itself has now relied upon Sultan Hassan IX, and that evidence should not be treated as a decorative historical curiosity. If the sixteenth century titulature and associated documentary material attributed to Hassan IX expressly identifies islands corresponding to Folhlhavai within the territorial conception of the Maldivian sovereign, it potentially predates by centuries the colonial administrative arrangements upon which the modern territorial configuration was subsequently constructed.

But historical evidence of this kind must be subjected to rigorous authentication. The original document, its provenance, language, diplomatic context, paleography, contemporary geographical terminology and the identification of the islands concerned all need to be established with care. A historical title cannot responsibly be built upon patriotic interpretation alone.

The Government should therefore commission and publish a critical documentary dossier, drawing upon Maldivian, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, Arabic and other relevant archives, rather than merely repeating that historical evidence exists. The objective should not be to manufacture history to fit a contemporary claim. It should be to determine what the surviving record actually establishes, and if that record supports the proposition advanced by the President, it belongs before the international community.

The Forgotten Question of 1946

There is another historical problem that deserves considerably more attention: the Maldives’ position at the beginning of the United Nations decolonisation system. Article 73 of the UN Charter imposed obligations upon administering powers concerning territories whose peoples had “not yet attained a full measure of self-government”, including the transmission of information concerning those territories. (United Nations Charter, Chapter XI)

Mauritius entered the UN decolonisation framework as a Non-Self-Governing Territory. The Maldives did not, and that omission requires historical investigation in its own right. The Maldives remained under British protection and did not achieve full independence until 1965, with its external relations substantially constrained under the arrangements with Britain throughout that period. Yet the Maldives was never placed on the UN list through which the international community supervised colonial decolonisation.

This does not, by itself, prove Maldivian sovereignty over Folhlhavai, nor would it automatically invalidate the subsequent UN treatment of Mauritius. Such conclusions would require considerably more evidence. But the omission raises a serious antecedent question: was the territorial configuration relevant to Maldivian decolonisation ever examined by the United Nations at all?

If Folhlhavai had previously formed part of the Maldivian territorial domain and had been detached or administratively reassigned during the period of British paramountcy, while the Maldives itself was excluded from the UN decolonisation machinery, then an important historical dimension may never have been presented to the General Assembly when the Mauritian decolonisation question was subsequently considered. That proposition should be investigated, documented and, if the evidence sustains it, placed formally before the United Nations.

The United Nations Route Cannot Be Postponed Indefinitely

This is where the Government’s present delay becomes difficult to understand. President Muizzu has already made the sovereignty assertion, and the President’s Office announced in March that documentation would be prepared and submitted to the relevant international authorities. The Attorney General’s Office has now confirmed to RaajjeTV that international experts are being consulted and that an international court is contemplated, yet the Office has still not identified the court, the jurisdictional basis, or even, publicly, the precise claim that would be placed before it. What has actually happened since the President’s announcement?

If sovereignty over Folhlhavai is genuinely the Government’s position, letters to London and Port Louis are not enough, and nor is an internal examination of the 2023 maritime delimitation judgment. The dispute must be internationalized through an identifiable legal and diplomatic strategy, which is precisely why the United Nations framework matters.

That does not mean that the Maldives can unilaterally haul Mauritius or the United Kingdom before the ICJ in contentious proceedings. The Court’s contentious jurisdiction ordinarily depends upon an appropriate jurisdictional basis binding the States concerned, and that obstacle must not be concealed. The General Assembly, however, has a central institutional role in questions of decolonisation. The ICJ itself emphasised that role in 2019, stating that the modalities for completing Mauritius’s decolonisation fell within the remit of the General Assembly. (ICJ Advisory Opinion)

If the Maldives contends that the UN’s existing understanding of Folhlhavai was constructed without consideration of an anterior Maldivian title, then the proper response is not endless domestic “review”. The Government should place the evidence before the United Nations and ask that the Maldivian claim be formally considered. That could include diplomatic engagement with the Secretary-General, the General Assembly and relevant UN decolonisation machinery, circulation of a comprehensive position paper as an official UN document where procedurally available, engagement with Member States, and ultimately the pursuit of an appropriate General Assembly process capable of obtaining authoritative consideration of the antecedent Maldivian claim.

One possible objective could be a request by an authorised UN organ for a further ICJ advisory opinion framed around questions that were not before the Court in 2019. Whether sufficient diplomatic support could be assembled for such a course is another matter, but that is a political challenge rather than a reason never to begin the process.

The Government Cannot Pursue Two Cases Without Explaining Their Relationship

There is nothing inherently improper about maintaining alternative legal positions. The Maldives could argue, as its primary case, that Folhlhavai is historically Maldivian territory, while simultaneously reserving a subsidiary position that, even if sovereignty lies elsewhere, its objections concerning maritime delimitation remain. International litigation routinely employs alternative submissions of this kind, but the Government must say so plainly.

At present, the public is hearing two narratives. One says that the Maldives “lost” maritime territory through the ITLOS delimitation and intends to recover it. The other says that Folhlhavai itself belongs to the Maldives. The first treats Mauritius as the coastal State on the opposite side of a maritime delimitation. The second challenges the very territorial premise from which the Mauritian maritime entitlement arises. Those positions require careful legal coordination, and every Government statement concerning the maritime boundary should therefore expressly state that it is without prejudice to the Maldives’ claim of sovereignty over Folhlhavai.

Otherwise the Maldives risks spending political and legal capital contesting the position of a line in the ocean while neglecting the much more fundamental question of who holds title to the territory from which that line was generated.

Decide What the Claim Is

The Muizzu Administration deserves credit for doing something previous governments were unwilling to do: publicly acknowledging that a Maldivian claim to Folhlhavai exists and identifying historical material that may support it. But declaring a claim is not the same as prosecuting one, and the Attorney General’s written response to RaajjeTV makes that distinction particularly urgent.

If the Government’s objective is merely to recover maritime territory allocated through the 2023 delimitation, it owes the public a precise explanation of the legal mechanism available after a judgment that is final and without ordinary appeal. If revision under Article 127 of the ITLOS Rules is contemplated, the Government should explain the basis upon which its stringent requirements could be satisfied.

If, however, the Government’s position is what the President himself has publicly stated, that Folhlhavai rightfully belongs to the Maldives, then the centre of gravity must move away from attempting to relitigate a maritime line and towards establishing the antecedent territorial case. That work is substantial. It requires serious archival research, careful historical cartography, and rigorous authentication of the Hassan IX documentation. It requires investigating the Maldives’ unexplained absence from the early UN Non-Self-Governing Territories framework and reconstructing the colonial administrative history by which Folhlhavai came to be treated separately from the Maldives. And it requires confronting, rather than pretending away, the formidable contrary conclusions reached within the Mauritius decolonisation process, before ultimately placing a properly documented Maldivian case before the United Nations.

The 2019 ICJ Advisory Opinion itself demonstrates what determined diplomacy through the United Nations can accomplish. Mauritius spent decades internationalizing its case before securing General Assembly action and an advisory proceeding before the world’s principal judicial organ.

The Maldives cannot simultaneously say that Folhlhavai is Maldivian territory and behave as though the real dispute concerns only a parcel of sea lost in 2023. The Government must decide which case it is making. If the case is sovereignty, the time for merely reviewing files in Malé has passed, and the historical evidence must be tested, assembled and carried into the international arena.

A maritime boundary is downstream of territorial sovereignty. If the Maldives claims the source, it should stop behaving as though its principal objective is merely to recover part of the sea.