Law expert: "Don't forget urban Maori"

 

Published by the Communications and Development Department

 

29 July 2003

 

One of the leading authorities on international indigenous people’s law says he doesn’t want future generations of New Zealanders to look back on the present as a time when wrongs were addressed but a significant proportion of urban Maori did not get the opportunity to benefit.

 

The New Zealand Law Foundation’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2003, Professor Benedict Kingsbury, has just completed a visit to Canterbury University. He graduated from the University in 1981 with a law degree with first class honours and went on to Oxford University to do a Masters and PhD on indigenous peoples and international law. He now works at New York University’s law school where he is also director of the Institute of International Law and Justice.

 

Professor Kingsbury presented a very well attended public lecture on whether indigenous peoples should have special rights in New Zealand or international law.

 

There were five different conceptual structures that could come in to play when considering indigenous people’s rights, he said: human rights, minority rights, self-determination, sovereignty and indigenous peoples as a special category of right holders. Potentially each structure could lead to a different conclusion and Professor Kingsbury said it was in the difficult cases that this was highlighted. Pushing any one structure to its extreme conclusion could lead to a bad result but Professor Kingsbury said, together, all five structures interlocked to provide a mutual checking function. Considered together all five approaches led to good, if unpredictable law, he said.

 

Dr Kingsbury said New Zealand had been relatively successful in forging laws involving indigenous people’s rights, to date, because the emphasis had been on building relationships. More consideration needed to be given, however, to Maori who were not part of traditional tribal structures.

 

“It is understandable that Maori want to rejuvenate hapu and iwi but the reality of modern life is there has been a dramatic urbanisation with many Maori in a situation where there is no real relationship with hapu and iwi,” he said.

 

“I don’t want future generations to look back with real regret on this as the generation that managed positive movement forward but was also responsible for serious neglect of other people in their lives.”

 

While the claims process tended to focus on traditional groups other enterprises needed to be developed that could reach urban Maori, he said.

 

Professor Kingsbury said several things started him on a career in international indigenous people’s law at a time when it was not a high profile topic at all. One was growing up in the Waikato and visiting Turangawaewae with his family. He became aware of the sense of injustice the Maori community felt over the taking of land.

 

His interest in indigenous law itself was sparked as a student at Canterbury when he took part in a moot court competition considering a case involving Ninety Mile beach where Maori were found not to have rights. While investigating the case study he became concerned about the decision. Twenty years later this decision has just been overturned leading to the recent controversy over the seabed and seashore.

 

At Oxford Professor Kingsbury was advised not to study international indigenous law because it would not be possible to make a career of it. He thought it was so interesting and important he went ahead any way and has spent a very successful career in a high profile, controversial and very rewarding area of law.

 

Professor Kingsbury’s visit followed that of the 2002 Distinguished Fellow, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin earlier this year.