E/CN.4/2004/80 page 8 14. In the United States, a court in Oklahoma held that the legal question concerning occupancy of the land would be solved in accordance with the way of life, customs and usages of the indigenous people who are its users and occupiers. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights upheld the rights of the indigenous Awas Tingni community to the protection of their property in a landmark case against the Government of Nicaragua, which had failed to provide adequate recognition and protection of the community’s customary land and resource tenure. Yet in 2002, the community submitted a new complaint for violation of constitutional rights to the Bilwi Court of Appeal to force the Government to comply with the decision of the Court. 15. The Sapporo District Court in Japan found the expropriation of Ainu land and the submersion of important Ainu religious, cultural and archaeological sites illegal (see E/CN.4/2003/90, paragraph 20). In Malaysia, a court decided that the Orang Asli have a proprietary interest in the customary and traditional lands occupied by them and have the right to use and derive profit from the land. In the late 1990s, the Constitutional Court of Colombia upheld the rights of the U’wa indigenous community against a licence for oil prospection on indigenous territory which the Government had given to a multinational corporation without the prior consent of the community. In another case, the Court upheld the rights of the Emberá-Katío with respect to the activities of an energy company which were damaging the environment and threatening the survival of this indigenous community. 16. The Supreme Court of Norway decided that the Sami people of Manndalen were the legitimate owners of the Svartskogen property on the basis of use from time immemorial, contrary to the determination of the Unenclosed Land Commission which had considered it to be State-owned land. In an earlier case, a majority of the Court had decided in favour of the reindeer-herding Sami community’s claim to the use of its ancestral common pastures in Selbu, against competing claims by individual landowning farmers, who had been supported since the nineteenth century by the official Lapp Commission.1 17. About 5,000 Khoikhoi people comprise the Richtersveld community in the Northern Cape of South Africa, where they have lived since time immemorial. In the late 1920s, a mine was opened on their land, and the community was removed to a nearby reserve. The Land Claims Court ruled that any rights the Richtersveld community may have had to the land were extinguished when the area was annexed by the British in 1847. It said that the Khoikhoi were “insufficiently civilized” to have rights to their traditional territories which had been declared terra nullius and had become Crown lands recognized after annexation. In 2003 however, upon appeal, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ordered the restitution of the land, including mineral rights. It ruled that the Richtersveld community had been in exclusive possession of the claimed lands prior to the annexation by the British Crown in 1847 and that these rights survived the annexation. The Land Claims Court had erred in finding that the community had lost its rights because it was insufficiently civilized to have its land rights recognized. It also ruled that the practices which gave rise to dispossession were racially discriminatory because they were based on the false, albeit unexpressed, premise that, because of the Richtersveld community’s race and lack of civilization, they had lost all rights to the land upon annexation.