Mabo v Queensland is a court case that was considered and resolved in the Supreme Court of Australia in 1988. Eddie Mabo was a plaintiff and a fighter for the right of indigenous people to own land. He sought to achieve through the court the right to have the island lands belong to Australia. The fight lasted for ten years, some of the judges rejected Mabo’s claim, but Judge Moynihan resumed hearings on the case. After a long time, a decision was made to satisfy the Mabo claim, and the law on the right of indigenous peoples to tribal lands was adopted.
The leading actor, in this case, was the plaintiff Eddie Mabo, one of the indigenous inhabitants of Murray Island in northern Australia. He appealed to the court with the petition that the lands of the indigenous peoples of Australia that once belonged to European colonizers should belong to Australia itself. While the case was being considered in the Queensland court, the state Parliament approved the Law on the Coastal Islands of the Torres Strait Islands. The Law stated that any rights that the Torres Strait Islanders had to the land after the approval of sovereign rights in 1879, at the moment, are canceled without compensation. The High Court had ordered the Supreme Court of Queensland to decide the facts on which the case was based.
Mabo fought for a fair distribution of land and mainly for the rights of indigenous people to land. The principle of the theory of tenure, which had been upheld since the medieval era, essentially required that the Crown obtain entire possession of the land after settlement. It stipulated that all land titles, rights, and interests had to be the consequence of the Crown’s consent or “gift.” Even though there was a distinction to be made, the jury and the common law used the term “desert and uncultivated” instead of “terra nullius”. Some semantic practices on the part of legislators seeking to start giving legal force to the appropriation of indigenous lands to the Crown essentially made the two concepts facto synonymous. The advantage of putting these principles into practice was that it created an assumption that the Crown had exclusive ownership of all of the land in Australia, including the Indigenous peoples who already lived there. It found that although Aboriginal peoples possessed their native legal system, their involvement in the land was not secretive and was unable to nullify the doctrine of terra nullius.
Although common law does not always follow international law, it does have a valid and significant impact on how it develops, particularly when international law recognizes the reality of universal rights. It is necessary to reevaluate a common law concept built on unfair discrimination in exercising civil and political rights. The establishment of discriminatory regulation that deprives the indigenous inhabitants of the established colonies of the right to live on their traditional lands because of their supposed place in the spectrum of social organization. This contradicts both international norms and the fundamental principles of our common law.
Overall, regarding their property rights, Indigenous Australians in Australia experienced a turning point with the Mabo case. It was a crucial turning point in the reconciliation-oriented development of Australian society. The High Court of Australia found that the common law represented the indigenous rights to those places where the title to the ancestral lands had not been extinguished. Immediately after this “landmark” case, further decisions modified how the law was construed. Invasion of new nations whose population could not be considered “civilized” from the Eurocentric standpoint was justified by the theory of terra nullius.