Repealing Resolution 2066: A Path to Justice for Maldives

Issued by: Historical and Legal Research Team, Maldivians for Chagos, The Maldives–Chagos Sovereignty Initiative.

When the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2066 (XX) on 16 December 1965, it unknowingly endorsed one of the most deliberate colonial manoeuvres of the twentieth century. The Lancaster House Agreement, framed as part of Mauritius’s path to independence, was in truth engineered to detach the Chagos Archipelago, exclude the Maldives, and create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) under the cover of decolonisation. What was negotiated in secrecy became, through UN silence, a resolution that legitimised deception.

The irony remains striking. The same Lancaster House record has been treated as binding before the Permanent Court of Arbitration when Mauritius sought maritime entitlements against the United Kingdom, yet non-binding before the International Court of Justice, where it was cited as proof of coercion when sovereignty itself was questioned. One document has served two contradictory legal purposes, and Resolution 2066 (XX) stands at the root of that confusion.

The result was concrete harm. Chagossians were uprooted, the Maldives was erased from a region over which it had asserted sovereignty for centuries, and a colonial carve-out was rebranded as decolonisation. The UN did not test the facts; it endorsed assumptions, and Resolution 2066 became the instrument that allowed deception to travel as law.

This article examines why Resolution 2066 (XX) must be repealed or rectified, tracing its origins, political distortions, and legal contradictions. It also reviews the historical and moral precedents within the United Nations General Assembly, where similarly flawed resolutions were reversed or annulled. Through that lens, it seeks to establish the legal and political grounds for restoring the truth erased by this defect and returning the Maldives–Chagos question to the rightful framework of international decolonisation.

1. The Political Context of a Historical Defect

During the Cold War, the UN became a stage for ideological competition over decolonisation. The Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and the Soviet bloc pushed to prevent colonial powers from redrawing maps at will. They intended to protect newly independent states from territorial fragmentation, but their approach substituted solidarity for scrutiny.

The doctrine of uti possidetis juris, meaning that post-colonial borders should follow colonial ones, was applied to every case, even to artificial colonies. Mauritius, a small European-made plantation colony, was treated as if it were an ancient nation whose unity had to be defended. Delegates from Ghana, Tanzania, and the USSR warned against “dismembering” Mauritius, but none asked whether Mauritius had ever possessed indigenous unity or pre-colonial identity.

Early Portuguese, Dutch, and British maps identified Chagos as part of the Maldivas Isles. Yet this record was ignored, and the Maldives, then a British Protectorate, was excluded entirely from the UN agenda. The question was framed as the “Question of Mauritius”, erasing centuries of Maldivian connection and converting a colonial administrative line into an international boundary.

2. Folklore, Forced Labour, and Forgotten Evidence

Maldivian memory preserves this history not through official archives but through folklore. Across Huvadhoo and Addu, islanders still tell of giant cats from the sea and Maali, night raiders camouflaged in palm leaves and foreign cloth who carried entire families away.

The legend of Gan in Huvadhoo Atoll tells of a whole island depopulated overnight. Kaadedhdhoo, Hulhuvaarulu, Maavaarulu, and Magudhdhoo share similar tales of sudden disappearance, their villages abandoned without a trace. To this day, these islands, including Gan, remain deserted. Another story speaks of the capture of men and women from the Kotte area of Hithadhoo in Addu, taken by seaborne strangers who vanished into the southern sea. These tales, repeated through generations, echo the trauma of forced removals that colonial documents now partly confirm.

From the mid-1700s onward, French privateers raided southern Maldivian islands to supply labour for plantations in Diego Garcia and the wider Chagos group. Importing workers from Africa was expensive and deadly. Abducting Maldivians nearby was cheaper and convenient. Governor Sir Thomas Maitland of Ceylon later admitted that Diego Garcia’s proximity made such labour “economically convenient.”

When Britain replaced France, it inherited and refined the practice. In 1810, the British warship HMS Sir Francis Drake and two companions seized 126 adults and eight children in the Chagos Archipelago and carried them to Ceylon. The operation, later portrayed as anti-slavery enforcement, repeated the same exploitative logic. The timing aligns with the Maldivian oral record of the sea raids. The “giant cats” of folklore appear to have been real ships.

This convergence of oral memory and colonial evidence shows that Maldivians were among the earliest people displaced for plantation labour in the central Indian Ocean. The mass expulsion of Chagossians in 1971 was the last act in a much older pattern of coerced migration and cultural erasure.

3. How the UN Ignored Facts and Rewarded Assumptions

3.1 A Question Framed in Error

Resolution 2066 (XX) rested on administrative geography rather than human reality. No UN mission visited the islands, no ethnographic or demographic verification was done, and no Maldivian representation was invited. The decision relied on British colonial maps drawn for navigation and taxation.

3.2 The Displacement that Followed

Between 1968 and 1971, Britain expelled the remaining inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago to clear Diego Garcia for a United States base. The UN did not object. The states that had voted for Resolution 2066 remained silent. The Chagossians, many of whom were of Maldivian ancestry, were reduced to refugees in Mauritius and Seychelles.

The OAU and NAM continued to support Mauritius out of anti-colonial solidarity, and the Soviet bloc used the issue to criticise Western militarism. Yet none revisited the false premise that Chagos had always been Mauritian.

4. How Resolution 1514 Was Misapplied to Mauritius

The delegates’ support for Mauritius invoked Resolution 1514 (XV), the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It declares that disrupting the “national unity and territorial integrity of a country” is incompatible with the UN Charter. Applied to true nations, this principle protects self-determination. Applied to a colonial project like Mauritius, it distorts it.

Mauritius was uninhabited before European colonisation. Its people were brought by colonial powers. Its “territorial integrity” was a British administrative line drawn in 1814 under the Treaty of Paris, not an inherited boundary of native identity. Meanwhile, historical maps from Portuguese, Dutch, and British sources describe Chagos as part of the Maldivas Isles, never as part of Mauritius.

The General Assembly thus protected a colonial boundary instead of dismantling one. This misapplied the spirit of Resolution 1541 (XV), which defines non-self-governing territories as distinct entities whose peoples differ from those of the administering power. By that test, the Maldives and Chagos qualified for decolonisation, not Mauritius. Resolution 2066 turned an administrative map into international law and left the true indigenous geography unrecognised.

5. Legal Grounds for Repeal or Rectification

In its Advisory Opinion of 25 February 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the separation of Chagos from Mauritius was unlawful and that decolonisation was incomplete (ICJ Advisory Opinion, 2019). The Maldives, never listed as a Non-Self-Governing Territory, was denied the right to present its case. Correcting this omission would reopen the record and align UN practice with its own Charter. The UN has already corrected comparable injustices through precedent.

5.1 Resolution 46/86 (1991): Revocation of Resolution 3379 (XXX) (1975)

The 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism became one of the UN’s most divisive acts. In 1991, recognising the moral and factual error, the General Assembly revoked it through Resolution 46/86, declaring the previous determination void. This established that the UN can retract resolutions that contradict its founding principles.

Like that case, Resolution 2066 (XX) was shaped by political pressure and misinformation. It too can be revoked on moral and legal grounds.

5.2 Resolution 2145 (XXI) (1966): Termination of South Africa’s Mandate over Namibia

In Resolution 2145 (XXI), the UN terminated South Africa’s League of Nations mandate over Namibia after determining that continued control violated self-determination. The Assembly not only ended an inherited legal arrangement but declared it void in law, proving that unjust territorial authority can be annulled.

The ICJ’s Namibia Opinion (1971) later confirmed this interpretation. By parallel reasoning, the detachment of Chagos, endorsed by Resolution 2066, can be nullified because it violated the same principle of self-determination.

5.3 Applying the Precedents

Taken together, these precedents show that the General Assembly can:

Revoke a resolution when it is morally or factually wrong.
Annul a territorial arrangement when it violates self-determination.

By that authority, Resolution 2066 (XX) should be repealed or replaced. It validated colonial detachment and excluded the Maldives from decolonisation. Repeal would not rewrite history; it would restore it.

6. The Responsibility to Rectify

Repealing Resolution 2066 (XX) would correct the record, not erase it. It would acknowledge that the UN once accepted a colonial act disguised as decolonisation and failed to recognise the Maldivian dimension of Indian Ocean sovereignty.

A new resolution should:

Revoke or supersede Resolution 2066 (XX).
Recognise that the detachment of Chagos violated UN principles of self-determination.
Include the Maldives in any future deliberations on Chagos.
Authorise a full historical and demographic review of the Maldives–Chagos link.
Provide reparative recognition to the displaced Chagossian people.

7. Conclusion

Resolution 2066 (XX) was born of political reflex, not evidence. It turned decolonisation into a bureaucratic transaction, excluded the Maldives, and enabled an empire to continue by other means. The OAU, NAM, and Soviet bloc defended the rhetoric of liberation but overlooked the realities of history.

Repealing that resolution is not an act of revisionism but of justice. The folklore of Huvadhoo Atoll, of Gan, Kaadedhdhoo, Hulhuvaarulu, Maavaarulu, and Magudhdhoo, together with the legends of Hithadhoo in Addu, the 1810 seizure of Maldivian islanders from Diego Garcia, and the silence of the archives, all point to a single truth: the Maldives and Chagos share a history written long before Britain or Mauritius.

To repeal Resolution 2066 (XX) is to return that truth to the map. It is to admit that the UN, too, can err, and that genuine decolonisation must begin by correcting the record it helped distort.

References

International Court of Justice. (2019). Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965.
United Nations General Assembly. (1960). Resolution 1514 (XV): Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
United Nations General Assembly. (1960). Resolution 1541 (XV): Principles for Determining Obligations under Article 73(e).
United Nations General Assembly. (1965). Resolution 2066 (XX): Question of Mauritius.
United Nations General Assembly. (1966). Resolution 2145 (XXI): Termination of the Mandate for South West Africa.
United Nations General Assembly. (1991). Resolution 46/86: Revocation of Resolution 3379 (XXX).
Admiralty Records. (1810). HMS Sir Francis Drake, Seizure Report, Ceylon (ADM 1/2198; CO 54/47–49). The National Archives, UK.
Bell, H. C. P. (1922). The Maldive Islands: Monograph on the History, Archaeology and Epigraphy. Ceylon Government Press.
Vine, David. (2009). Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia. Princeton University Press.