French dispute with former colony over island intensifies
France must address a decades-old dispute with its former colony, the archipelago of Mauritius, over control of Tromelin Island, the island nation’s foreign minister has insisted.
The Indian Ocean territory, which incorporates a huge oceanic economic zone, is part of Mauritius, Dhananjay Ramful told the UN General Assembly.
Mauritius maintains that Tromelin was among the dependencies ceded with Mauritius to Britain under an 1814 treaty. It formally asserted its claim in 1976, eight years after gaining independence. However, France continues to administer the largely uninhabited island and claims sovereignty over it.
“The island of Tromelin is an integral part of the territory of the Republic of Mauritius,” Ramful said in New York on Friday. He called on Paris to engage “in the spirit of friendship” to resolve the dispute.
Tromelin covers about 1 sq km, but the surrounding exclusive economic zone exceeds 280,000 sq km and contains valuable fishing grounds. France has administered the island since 1954, when it established a meteorological station there.
The two countries signed an agreement in 2010 to jointly manage fishing, environmental protection, and research around Tromelin without deciding who owns it. France’s Senate approved the deal in 2012, but the government withdrew it from a scheduled National Assembly debate in 2017 amid opposition to joint management. The agreement remains unratified.
Tromelin is not France’s only territorial dispute with a former African colony. Madagascar claims four French-administered islands in the Mozambique Channel, while the Comoros claims Mayotte, which France governs as an overseas department.
Mauritius also has a territorial dispute with Britain over the Chagos Archipelago. London separated the islands from British-ruled Mauritius in 1965. In his UN address, Ramful called Mauritian sovereignty over Chagos “non-negotiable” and pointed to a treaty signed with Britain in May 2025 as a path toward settling the dispute.
Britain signed a treaty last year to transfer sovereignty over Chagos to Mauritius while retaining the joint UK-US base on Diego Garcia under a 99-year lease. The deal followed a 2019 International Court of Justice opinion that Britain’s separation of the islands from Mauritius before independence was unlawful. The treaty has yet to take effect. US President Donald Trump has called it a “terrible deal” and opposed the transfer of the strategically important islands. Britain has put the agreement on hold, with Defense Secretary Wes Streeting saying last week that it “can’t go ahead without American support.”
