Pope meets with Chagos refugees and delivers message about rights of the weak against the powerful

ROME (AP) — Pope Leo XIV strongly affirmed the rights of the weakest against the ambitions of the powerful during an audience Saturday with refugees from Chagos, a contested Indian Ocean archipelago that is home to a strategic U.S.-U.K. military base.

History’s first American pope insisted on the right of the Chagossian people to return to their homes and hailed a recent U.K.-Mauritius treaty over the archipelago’s future as symbolically important on the international stage.

Leo met with a delegation of refugees from Chagos, some 2,000 of whom who were evicted from their homes by Britain in the 1960s and 1970s so the U.S. could build a naval and bomber base on the largest of the islands, Diego Garcia.

Displaced islanders fought for years in U.K. courts for the right to go home. In May,