Published May 11, 2009

KL court affirms Sarawak tribes' land rights

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(KUALA LUMPUR) Malaysia's highest court has affirmed a ruling granting land rights to indigenous people 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, said See Chee How, a prominent land rights lawyer.

'It is a landmark decision,' said Mr See of last Tuesday's ruling. 'It's the first time the Federal Court has affirmed (such) a decision.'

Mr 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 people, 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 more-than- a-decade-old case, but last Tuesday another Federal Court panel upheld the ruling in favour of the family. -- AP