... This is contrasted with other common law rights to land which come about upon a grant from the Crown after the assertion of Crown sovereignty.2 Meyers has asserted that the judicial treatment of indigenous rights in North America and New Zealand serves to illuminate three fundamental principles of common law native title which illustrate it as sui generis interest.3 First, indigenous communities were considered to be sovereigns in their own right at the time of colonisation, thus the source of aboriginal land rights in the newly acquired territory is the pre-existing, communal occupancy of and sovereignty over the land by aboriginal people at the time of assertion of paramount sovereignty to that territory by the colonising state.4 Secondly, prior occupation /prior sovereignty gives rise to the powers to control resources on reserve/retained land, as well as diminished self-government rights for indigenous peoples. And finally, the acknowledgement of indigenous prior occupancy ...

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