evidence: Diego Garcia, coral atoll, largest and southernmost member of the Chagos Archipelago, in the central Indian Ocean, part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Occupying an area of 17 square miles (44 square km), it consists of a V-shaped sand-fringed cay about 15 miles (24 km) in length with a maximum width of about 7 miles (11 km); its lagoon is open at the north end. [...] In the late 1990s, islanders from the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, sued for the right to return home, and in 2000 a British court ruled that the 1971 ordinance banning them from the islands was unlawful. U.S. and British officials opposed the plan for resettlement, but in 2006 the court upheld its decision. In 2007 the British government lost its case before the Court of Appeal but announced its intention to challenge that decision in the House of Lords. The following year a majority of the panel of five Law Lords ruled against the islanders, although the government expressed regret for the original removal. In 2017 the UN General Assembly formally requested that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) review whether the decolonization of Mauritius, with regard to the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, had been lawfully completed and what the consequences of British rule over the Chagos Archipelago had been. The ICJ’s ruling, which came in February 2019, found that the decolonization process had been illegal and recommended that the United Kingdom return the islands to Mauritius as soon as possible.