E/CN.4/2006/78/Add.3 page 10 Tribunal in respect of the claims of a group. The Treaty settlement process is intended to be reparative and to provide redress for historical misconduct. It is therefore intimately connected to the right to a remedy for breaches of legal rights. Successive New Zealand Governments have accepted that Maori have a moral and political right to redress under the Treaty, but not a legal right. 31. Ngai Tahu lost most of their extensive landholdings and assets during the nineteenth century and were never given the resources and services that the Government had promised them. After filing unsuccessful claims against the Crown for many decades, a Waitangi Tribunal claim in 1986 led to a negotiated settlement in 1997 and the passage of the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act in 1998. In addition to an apology from the Crown and cultural redress, Ngai Tahu accepted a payment of NZ$ 170 million (much less than the real value of what the Government actually owed them according to informed sources), recognizing the limitations on the amount of redress available. This allowed the tribe to establish an economic corporation which currently has interests in tourism, fishing and property. This financial security enables the tribe to deliver social benefits back to iwi members who are all the tribal descendants from the official census of 1848, wherever they may live today. 32. Treaty settlements that have been negotiated so far involve quantities of reparation that represent merely a fraction of the value of the land and resources lost by Maori during the colonial period. As at December 2005, $748 million has been committed to final and comprehensive settlements with 18 claimant groups and several part settlements. Settlements currently cover more than half of New Zealand’s land area, and more than half of the iwi that suffered confiscation, recognized as the most serious Treaty breach. The average settlement received by claimants is estimated to correspond to approximately one per cent of real value. Two of the groups who negotiated a settlement (Ngai Tahu and Tainui) received NZ$170 million each, an amount that some Maori consider as insufficient to provide economic well-being for several thousand registered tribal members, and successive generations to follow. Other settlements involve much lower figures. 33. Maori argue that the cultural redress is equally insufficient, because the mechanisms involved in the settlements do not always restore either symbolically or in actuality ancestral homelands to the claimant group. In the Special Rapporteur’s view, it would be more practical to include management regimes according to customary precepts, as some of them do, acknowledging that Maori possess primary decision-making capacity over appropriate sites, thus enabling greater expression of Maori cultural and spiritual relationships. 34. Maori legal authorities told the Special Rapporteur that they consider it constitutionally improper to force claimants to waive their entitlement to the protection of the courts when they negotiate settlements, especially as it is achieved through coercion; until the claimants have waived their rights, the negotiations will not be finalized. They feel that the result is a largely imposed settlement package, which claimants cannot bring before an independent or judicial body for rigorous qualitative testing. The Government notes that settlements do not affect any ongoing rights of claimants, although their historical claims cannot be reopened. Claimants are not in any way coerced to accept a settlement, and are free at any point to end negotiations. 35. Claimants must incorporate as “Trust Boards” or similar bodies in order to receive and administer the assets of a settlement. This decision has met with some criticism from Maori who feel that it is more appropriate for Maori themselves to decide who is to represent them and how