Malaysia’s highest court has affirmed a ruling granting land rights to indigenous peoples that could help them resist oil and logging companies razing their ancestral forests, a lawyer said yesterday.
A panel of three Federal Court judges unanimously ruled that tribes have customary ownership of land they have lived on for generations and state governments cannot take it from them without compensation, prominent land rights lawyer See Chee How said.
“It is a landmark decision,” said See of Tuesday’s ruling.
“It’s the first time the Federal Court has affirmed [such] a decision,” See said.
See said he hoped this would bode well for more than 100 other land rights cases still pending in court.
Land rights are a key concern for the country’s indigenous peoples, many of whom have been pushed off land without compensation by state governments to make way for development.
State governments claim the tribes have no legal rights to their ancestral land, which is owned by the state. But the tribes, who mostly live in poor settlements in the jungles on Borneo island, argue that the land is theirs because they have lived on it for generations.
In 2007 the Federal Court ruled that a family of the Kedayan group in Sarawak state on Borneo had rights over land they used and that they should be compensated. The government had taken over the land in the 1990s to grant it for oil exploration.
The state government sought a final review of the decision in the case, but on Tuesday another Federal Court panel upheld the ruling in favor of the family.
Activists say tribes’ livelihood is being threatened by companies that clear land for logging and oil palm projects and laws that do not recognize or protect their indigenous customs and right to land ownership.
Last year in an unprecedented move, the federal government said it would grant ownership of farming land to about 20,000 indigenous families to improve their lives.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS