Chagos Islanders lose European court battle to return home

LONDON | Thu Dec 20, 2012 1:17pm EST

(Reuters) - Indian Ocean islanders expelled from the British-ruled Chagos archipelago during the Cold War to make way for a U.S. military base lost their long-running legal battle to return home on Thursday.

About 2,000 Chagossians were evicted from their palm-fringed homes in the late 1960s when Britain allowed the United States to build an air and naval base on Diego Garcia, the archipelago's largest island.

The islanders have long contested their removal and the way it was carried out, but the European Court of Human Rights definitively rejected the exiled residents' case on Thursday.

It said their case, which was lodged in 2004, was inadmissible because they had already been compensated in the British courts.

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