The agreement ends decades of dispute over Britain’s last African colony, from which thousands of people were forcibly evicted, while maintaining a key U.S.-British military base there.

After years of negotiations, the UK is giving up its sovereignty over a cluster of strategically important Indian Ocean islands. The move has led to criticism from Britain's Conservative opposition and some local Indigenous groups.

The U.K. has agreed to hand sovereignty of the long-contested Chagos Islands, an archipelago of more than 60 islands in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, in a deal to secure the future of a strategically important U.