evidence: The panel of judges at the United Nation's International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLS) explicitly criticised the UK's failure to hand the territory over to its former colony, Mauritius, by December 2019, as earlier demanded by a near-unanimous vote at the UN's General Assembly. "The judgement… is clear and unequivocal. Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago," Mauritius's Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth told the BBC. [...] The UK, which was the former colonial power in Mauritius, has repeatedly promised to hand control of the Chagos archipelago back to Mauritius once the islands are no longer needed for defence purposes.