Flag: British Indian Ocean Territory Emoji

The flag of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the UK overseas territory that covers the Chagos Archipelago in the central Indian Ocean. Blue Ensign, Union Jack in the canton, seven wavy white stripes for the Indian Ocean, a palm tree rising above a Tudor Crown on the fly. 1:2 ratio, first unfurled 8 November 1990.

BIOT is a set of seven atolls with 60 km² of total land area. By far the biggest island is Diego Garcia, which hosts the joint UK-US military base. The outer atolls (Peros Banhos, Salomon, and others) are uninhabited. BIOT's permanent civilian population as of 2026 is just six, with about 2,000 additional military and contractor personnel on Diego Garcia. It is one of the tiniest populated territories on earth.

The emoji is U+1F1EEU+1F1EE + U+1F1F4U+1F1F4, IO being the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the territory. Unlike 🇩🇬 (Diego Garcia, a CLDR exceptional code), 🇮🇴 is a fully standard flag emoji. Both render the same palm-and-crown image on every major platform. Added to Unicode in the original flag set.

🇮🇴 sits at the centre of one of the most-litigated sovereignty disputes in modern international law. The UK purchased the archipelago from Mauritius in 1965 for £3 million and forcibly removed the Chagossian population between 1968 and 1973. An ICJ advisory opinion in 2019 ruled UK administration unlawful. In October 2024 the UK agreed to return sovereignty to Mauritius while keeping Diego Garcia on a 99-year lease. The treaty was signed 22 May 2025; US ratification was suspended in April 2026.

🇮🇴 is a rare flag on social media. It has no tourism industry, no diaspora in the usual sense, and no sports team. The posts that carry 🇮🇴 fall into a small number of buckets.

Chagos Islands sovereignty news. The biggest driver by far. The October 2024 sovereignty agreement and the May 2025 treaty each produced sharp multi-week spikes, concentrated on legal and geopolitical X, BBC and Al Jazeera comment threads, and Mauritian political accounts.

Chagossian activism. Around 10,000 people of Chagossian descent live in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Crawley in the UK. Chagossian activist accounts use 🇮🇴 alongside 🇲🇺 and 🇬🇧 in posts about the right of return, court rulings, and the February 2026 landing at Île du Coin by four Chagossians who attempted to establish permanent residence.

The .io.io startup angle. The internet TLD .io.io belongs to BIOT. Countless tech startups use .io domains, and 🇮🇴 occasionally shows up in tongue-in-cheek posts about the territory's digital footprint being orders of magnitude larger than its physical one. Concerns about the TLD's fate after the Mauritius handover have triggered a steady trickle of 🇮🇴 posts among developers.

Sailing and exploration content. A small number of private sailing permits are issued each year for the outer atolls. The few travel accounts that document sailing the Chagos post 🇮🇴 rarely but memorably.

• 🏝️
  Administrative HQ: Diego Garcia (7.30°S, 72.40°E); commissioner based in London
• 👥
  Civilian population: ~6 permanent residents (2026), plus ~2,000 military on Diego Garcia
• 🗺️
  Area: 60 km² across seven atolls
• 🌊
  Marine protected area: 640,000 km², one of the largest in the world
• 💷
  Currency: Pound sterling official; US dollar de facto on Diego Garcia
• 🗣️
  Language: English
• 📞
  Calling code: +246
• ⏰
  Time zone: UTC+6, no DST
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .io

BIOT's islands

The flag dates from 8 November 1990, when it was first used as the Commissioner's personal flag rather than a territorial ensign. Over the next two decades it slid into broader semi-official use, and by the 2000s it was flying on land at the Diego Garcia base. It has never been given the full royal warrant that many UK overseas territory flags have, which is part of why its status has always been described as "semi-official."

The design combines four elements. The Union Jack in the canton marks British sovereignty. The seven wavy white stripes on a blue field represent the waters of the Indian Ocean and signal the territory's ocean-defined nature. The palm tree on the fly is the standard tropical-territory symbol used across many UK overseas badges. The crown above the palm was originally the St Edward's Crown and was changed to the Tudor Crown in 2026 following the coronation of King Charles III, which standardized the Tudor on British royal symbols.

The territory the flag represents was created in 1965 when the UK detached the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius three years before Mauritian independence, and Aldabra, Farquhar, and Des Roches from the Seychelles four years before Seychellois independence (the three Seychellois atolls returned in 1976). The UK and US signed an agreement in 1966 making Diego Garcia available as a military facility for 50 years, later extended to 2036. Between 1968 and 1973, the entire civilian population of about 1,500 Chagossians was removed to Mauritius and Seychelles.

Litigation followed for decades. In the Chagos Islanders vs UK cases in the UK courts, in Mauritius v UK at UNCLOS and the ICJ, and in the UN General Assembly's 116 to 6 vote in May 2019 endorsing the ICJ opinion. The 3 October 2024 agreement between Keir Starmer's government and Mauritius was the political resolution: sovereignty returns to Mauritius, Diego Garcia is leased back for 99 years for base operations, and the UK pays Mauritius a sizable annual fee. The treaty was signed on 22 May 2025. Ratification was suspended in April 2026 after opposition from the Trump administration in the US.

• •BIOT's total land area is 60 km². About half of that is Diego Garcia alone. The rest is scattered across six other atolls, most uninhabited since 1973.
• •The UK paid £3 million for the Chagos Archipelago in 1965, detaching it from Mauritius three years before Mauritian independence.
• •The territory's .io.io TLD has more websites on it than BIOT has people by a factor of roughly one million to one.
• •The Chagos Marine Protected Area, declared in 2010, is bigger than France.
• •BIOT has a postal service that exists almost entirely for philatelists. BIOT stamps are a small but collectible category, with the palm-and-crown flag on several issues.
• •The territory uses pound sterling as its official currency, but the US dollar is the de facto currency on Diego Garcia because of the US military presence.
• •In February 2026, four Chagossians landed on Île du Coin in the Peros Banhos atoll and refused to leave, briefly declaring a rival local government. The first civilian resettlement attempt in BIOT since 1973.