Still Not Sovereign: How Britain Never Left Cyprus

Between 1878 and 1959, Cyprus was administered as a British colony, first under nominal Ottoman sovereignty, then as a formal Crown colony. Like many former colonial territories, Cyprus achieved independence not through an open act of self-determination, but via an arrangement that preserved core imperial interests. This remains the case today due to the existence of the British Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) – Akrotiri and Dhekelia – which remain under full UK sovereignty, as formalised in the 1960 Treaty of Establishment.

This makes Cyprus an outlier. It is the only EU member state that hosts foreign sovereign territory used exclusively for military purposes. These areas, covering approximately 3% of the island’s landmass, are governed directly by the British Ministry of Defence, not by the Republic of Cyprus, the European Union or any multilateral mandate.

While the United Kingdom justified the SBAs based on the 1960 Treaty of Establishment, that defence cannot be separated from the colonial context in which the treaty was signed. Notably, the treaty did not contain any provision enabling the Cypriot people or Government to revisit, renegotiate, or withdraw from the arrangement - effectively cementing it as a permanent transfer of sovereignty decided without their democratic input.

The absence of a referendum, the exclusion of the Cypriot population from meaningful participation, and the treaty’s entrenchment of foreign military sovereignty all raise profound questions about democratic legitimacy, legal continuity, and the unfinished business of postcolonial self-determination. More than six decades later, those questions remain unanswered and increasingly difficult to ignore.

The legal defence of the SBAs collapses under the weight of international legal precedent, most notably, the International Court of Justice's 2019 Advisory Opinion on the Chagos Archipelago. In that case, the ICJ found that Britain’s decision to excise Chagos from Mauritius in 1965, shortly before granting it independence, constituted a serious violation of the right to self-determination. The Court concluded that by 1960, the right to self-determination had already been established as a binding legal norm, applicable to all decolonisation processes. 

The parallels with Cyprus are direct. In its written submission to the Court, the Republic of Cyprus explicitly aligned itself with the principles affirmed in the Chagos case, stating that the Court’s clarification of the law governing decolonisation was “of direct interest” to its own legal position. The submission emphasised that any decolonisation process that allows a former colonial power to retain sovereign land, without ongoing popular consent, is legally defective.

What the ICJ confirmed, and what the British Government continues to ignore, is that treaty formalism cannot cure the illegality of territorial detachment during decolonisation. Legal instruments forged under conditions of dependency do not have indefinite legitimising power. To rely on a Cold War-era treaty, established without popular participation, to justify British military sovereignty over EU territory in 2025 is not only anachronistic – it is legally indefensible.

The current legality of the 1960 Treaty of Establishment cannot be assessed in isolation from the legal transformations that followed. 

In East Timor (1995), the ICJ confirmed that the right to self-determination is not merely a political inspiration but an erga omnes obligation – a duty owed by all states to all peoples. Earlier, in its Namibia Advisory Opinion (1971), the Court held that acts violating such obligations cannot produce legal effects, even if clothed in formal treaties. 

These precedents cast doubt on the ongoing enforcement of arrangements, such as the SBAs, that were established in the absence of free and genuine consent. 

The 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties reflects this. Article 53 states that any treaty which conflicts with a peremptory norm of general international law (jus cogens) is void. Although not retroactive, the Convention solidified a broader shift: the age of entrenching colonial advantage through treaty law has no legitimacy under contemporary international law.

Recent developments have also exposed the SBAs to growing scrutiny beyond Cyprus. Reports that Akrotiri has been used to facilitate British and allied military support for operations in Gaza, including intelligence and logistical assistance, have triggered criticism from the international and Cypriot communities alike. 

This is not simply a question of neutrality, but of involuntary complicity. While the Republic of Cyprus officially maintains a policy of non-alignment in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the presence of British sovereign territory being used for military interventions weakens that stance. It risks positioning Cyprus as a strategic outpost, rather than a sovereign state acting in accordance with its own democratic will and foreign policy principles. 

Some have argued that the SBAs contribute to Cyprus’s security, a narrative rooted more in Cold War paternalism than legal or strategic reality. This view assumes small states require external supervision for their own stability, a logic that rationalised Western interference in postcolonial states throughout the Cold War and persists today in subtler forms. The bases were not designed to defend Cyprus, and their record proves it: in 1974, Britain did nothing to prevent the Turkish invasion despite being a guarantor power.

Moreover, Cyprus has no operational say over what is launched or landed from its own soil. Far from offering protection, the bases risk entangling Cyprus in foreign conflicts, as seen most recently in operations linked to Gaza. 

Security without sovereignty is an illusion, and one that served the interests of the occupying power, not the occupied state.

This is not to downplay the ongoing occupation in the North, but rather to expose how British presence in the south has similarly compromised Cyprus’s sovereignty – only more quietly, and with formal treaties as cover.

This is not to suggest that dismantling the SBAs would resolve the Cyprus Problem. But their continued existence must no longer be treated as an untouchable fixture. As negotiations on reunification and constitutional reform resume in the shadow of regional instability, the SBAs must be reframed as a core issue, not a peripheral one. 

Their presence prolongs Cyprus’s colonial subordination, undermines the integrity of its sovereignty, and introduces an asymmetric power dynamic into every diplomatic roundtable. The legal case is increasingly indefensible. The political rationale, that the bases are indispensable to Western security, must now confront the uncomfortable reality that strategic interests do not grant immunity from international law. 

A postcolonial state cannot be truly sovereign while fragments of its territory remain under the flag of its former coloniser. The time to correct that contradiction is long overdue.

If a just and lasting solution is ever to be reached, Cypriot sovereignty must be treated not as negotiable terrain, but as the very starting point.

Image: Flickr/Number 10 (Tim Hammond)

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