iTaukei Land Legislation and Vanua Consent: The Framework the Constitution Delegates

Ownership is constitutional. Control is statutory.

The 2013 Constitution of Fiji says the vanua owns its land. Section 27 recognises iTaukei land ownership. Section 28 protects that ownership from permanent alienation. Section 30 guarantees landowners a share of mineral royalties. What the Constitution does not say is who actually decides what happens on that land.
That is a separate legislative framework — and it does most of the work.
The Tui Nayau piece argued that chiefly authority is a constitutional source the written framework refuses to recognise. This piece argues the corollary. Even where the Constitution does recognise the vanua, as owner of iTaukei land, the state has statutorily displaced the vanua from the decisions that ownership would otherwise carry. Ownership is constitutional. Control is statutory. And the space between them is where vanua governance now operates.

Argument in brief

The piece maps how ordinary legislation — chiefly the iTaukei Land Trust Act and the Land Use Decree 2010 — allocates administrative control over iTaukei land to statutory bodies. It shows how this operates across leasing, minerals and foreshores, and identifies the statutory levers that would restore more direct vanua control.

A note on register and standing

This piece analyses vanua governance in the register FPR applies to constitutional and legislative matters: grounded in statute, sourced in public records, argued in English for a broad Pacific and Fijian audience. It is one contribution to a much wider conversation the vanua itself has been having about its own governance for generations, in registers, languages, and ceremonial forms that FPR does not access. The chiefly institutions, mataqali structures, provincial councils, and vanua deliberations that carry the substantive work of iTaukei self-governance are not replaced by analysis of this kind, and are not intended to be. What FPR offers here is a public examination of the state's legislative framework as it operates on iTaukei land, a framework that governs the vanua whether or not the vanua's own internal processes engage with it. That framework is a legitimate subject of public analysis. The vanua remains the custodian of its own conversation about what its authority requires.

The iTaukei Lands Act 1940 — Recognition without Administration

The foundational statute for iTaukei land ownership is the iTaukei Lands Act (Cap 133), previously the Native Lands Act. It recognises customary tenure by mataqali, yavusa, and tokatoka. It provides for the iTaukei Land and Fisheries Commission (formerly the Native Land Commission) to define ownership boundaries, hear disputes about customary title, and maintain the Vola ni Kawa Bula, the register of members of each landowning unit.

The Act protects ownership. Ownership under the Act is held by the landowning unit as a whole, not by individual members. Members enjoy rights of use and benefit from their land but cannot dispose of it, transfer it, or assign their interest to anyone of their choosing. As the iTaukei Land Trust Board itself describes it, a member’s right of ownership “is in reality a collective life interest rather than an individual interest in perpetuity.”

What the 1940 Act does not deal with is the administration of that land in dealings with people outside the vanua. The Act contemplates internal customary use. Leases, commercial arrangements, agreements with the state — these are not administered by the mataqali or the yavusa under the 1940 Act. They are administered under a separate instrument passed in the same year.

That separation is the beginning of the pre‑emption.

A note on the colonial genealogy

The 1940 Acts did not appear from nowhere. They were the codification of colonial land policy that began with the Native Lands Ordinance 1875, extended through the Native Lands Commission established by Governor Sir Arthur Gordon, and continued through the codification of mataqali tenure by the colonial administration in the early twentieth century. The mataqali, yavusa, and tokatoka existed before colonialism as kinship and territorial units; this piece does not suggest otherwise. What was colonial was the process of fixing them: defining their boundaries in writing, recording their membership in official registers, homogenising practices that varied significantly across vanua into a single national framework, and making them the exclusive legal categories through which iTaukei land tenure could be recognised by the state. The historian Peter France’s The Charter of the Land (1969) remains the foundational critique of that fixing. The “surrender” the TLTB describes was not a negotiated arrangement between equal parties. It was formalised under a colonial administration that had already decided that customary tenure, as it actually operated, was too fluid for capitalist development and needed to be pinned down in writing.

Recognising this genealogy does not undermine the analysis, but sharpens it. The framework Fiji operates under today is not the neutral inheritance of an administrative convenience. It is the continuation of a colonial regulatory project that the post‑independence state has retained and, in the 2010 decrees, deepened.

The iTaukei Land Trust Act 1940 — The Surrender of Control

The iTaukei Land Trust Act (Cap 134), also previously the Native Land Trust Act, established the iTaukei Land Trust Board — the TLTB — and vested in it the exclusive statutory power to administer iTaukei land in dealings with third parties.

The TLTB’s own official description of the framework is remarkable for its candour. Under the Act, “iTaukei landowners have surrendered their rights to control and administer their own land and vested these in the Board of Trustees of the iTaukei Land Trust Board to control and administer their land on their behalf.”

The Act is explicit about the legal consequences of this surrender. Section 5(2) provides that “all dealings not authorised by the TLTB are void.” A lease agreed directly between a mataqali and a lessee, without TLTB authorisation, has no legal effect. The mataqali may hold the land in customary title. The mataqali cannot, as a matter of Fijian law, lease it.

Section 23(1) provides that the TLTB “is to be sued in place of the landowners in disputes.” The mataqali is the owner. The mataqali is not the litigant. If a dispute arises over a lease, over rent, over the terms of a dealing, the party that appears in court is the statutory Board — not the customary owner. The vanua is legally represented by a state‑created body rather than by itself.

Once a lease is registered under the Act, it is deemed indefeasible under section 38 of the Land Transfer Act. Indefeasibility means the lease cannot be set aside except in narrowly defined circumstances. Even where the mataqali later objects to how the lease was granted, the registered lease stands.

This is not a hostile framework. The TLTB was established to protect iTaukei land from the fragmentation and alienation that unregulated dealings might have caused. The trustees framework was designed for landowners’ benefit. But the mechanism of that protection is not simple delegation. Delegation would mean the vanua retains the underlying authority and merely assigns its exercise to an agent. Section 5(2), by rendering unauthorised dealings void, does more than that. It statutorily pre‑empts the vanua’s regulatory authority over its own land and vests that authority in the Board. Ownership is preserved. Regulatory jurisdiction has been transferred.

The distinction matters constitutionally.

When the 2013 Constitution says iTaukei land ownership is protected, it protects the pre‑empted arrangement, not the underlying customary jurisdiction. The vanua owns. The Board decides.

The Land Use Decree 2010 — Parallel Regime, Deeper Delegation

The Bainimarama government, in the aftermath of the 2006 coup, introduced significant changes to the iTaukei land governance framework. The most consequential of these was the Land Use Decree 2010, published as Decree No 36 in the Republic of Fiji Islands Government Gazette on 2 July 2010. Alongside it came the Native Land Trust (Amendment) Decree 2010 (No 32), passed the same day.

The Land Use Decree created a parallel leasing regime. Under it, the Ministry of Lands could administer leases on iTaukei land through the Land Use Unit — a state body distinct from the TLTB. Landowners were offered a choice: lease their land through the TLTB, as had been the exclusive path since 1940, or designate their land to the Land Use Unit for leasing by the state.

The framing was one of choice and efficiency. The government argued the new regime would attract investors, streamline processes, and generate higher returns for landowners. Its critics argued something different.

Under the TLTB regime, the mataqali retained residual customary control over land that had been reserved but not leased. If the TLTB proposed a lease that the mataqali opposed, the mataqali could — in principle — resist. Under the Land Use Decree, land designated to the Land Use Unit is head‑leased to the State, which then holds it for the term of the arrangement. There is no residual customary control over designated but unleased land. The connection between the iTaukei and the vanua is, in the analysis of legal scholar Matthew Dodd in a University of Otago study of the Land Use Unit regime, “severed to an even greater extent than the TLTB regime.”

The Native Land Trust (Amendment) Decree 2010 tightened the constraints on the TLTB itself. The amendment reduced the grounds on which the TLTB could withhold consent for dealings with iTaukei land. Under the amendment, consent could only be refused where there had been a breach of a lease condition — such as non‑payment of rent — or where an application did not follow the law.

The Fiji Times, in analysis published on 14 August 2021, described the practical effect of this in plain terms. The amendment, the paper observed, “deprived TLTB of rights of refusal, as the legal custodian of iTaukei lands, for the other dealings.” The TLTB, which had been established in 1940 as the surrendered custodian of vanua consent, was now itself constrained in exercising that custody.

The Land Use Decree also included extensive privative clauses. These clauses limit the ability of landowners to enforce their rights against the State through the courts. Where a landowner disputes a decision under the Decree, the pathways to challenge are narrow. The Decree does not exclude the fundamental protections of the Land Transfer Act on registration, but the ability to bring a landowner claim against the state in practical terms is diminished.

None of these instruments has been repealed. The Rabuka coalition government has not moved to reverse the 2010 decrees. The Land Use Unit continues to operate. The Land Use Decree remains in force. The 2010 amendments to the Native Land Trust Act remain in force. The framework the Bainimarama government put in place is the framework Fiji operates under today.

The Constitutional Framework Above and Around This

Ownership vs Administration

The 2013 Constitution’s iTaukei land provisions do genuine constitutional work. Section 27 recognises iTaukei ownership. Section 28 prohibits permanent alienation of iTaukei land. Section 30 guarantees landowners a share of royalties from mining conducted on their land. These provisions have constitutional status. They cannot be repealed by ordinary legislation.

What the Constitution does not do is entrench the mechanism through which iTaukei land is actually administered. The iTaukei Land Trust Act, the Land Use Decree, and the amendments to both are all ordinary legislation. They can be amended, expanded, restricted, or replaced by any government with a parliamentary majority. The constitutional protection of ownership sits above a legislative floor of administration that is far more contested.

Minerals and Foreshores

Section 30 illustrates this pattern. The Constitution guarantees landowners a share of mineral royalties. It does not guarantee ownership of the minerals themselves. Section 7 of the iTaukei Land Trust Act (Cap 134) is the statutory hinge here. It subjects iTaukei land to the provisions of a series of other regulatory statutes, including the Mining Act (Cap 146), the Petroleum (Exploration and Exploitation) Act (Cap 148), the Forest Act (Cap 150), and the Crown Acquisition of Lands Act (Cap 13). It is section 7 of the TLTA — not the Constitution — that opens iTaukei land to State mineral and resource jurisdiction. Under the Mining Act and the Petroleum Act, all minerals in Fiji, including precious metals, precious stones, and petroleum, are owned by the State regardless of whether they are found on iTaukei land, freehold land, or State land. Section 30 gives landowners a share of the royalty the State collects. It does not give them ownership of what is extracted.

The TLTB, in a statement covered by FBC News in August 2026, described the practical consequence. “This means that landowners will only get 80 percent of the five percent royalty paid to the State, for example, on the value of gold extracted.

The vanua that owns the land does not own what is beneath it. The State does. The State pays a royalty. The landowner receives a share of the royalty. The constitutional provision protects that share. It does not protect ownership.

This is the pattern the Constitution consistently produces. The written framework recognises iTaukei ownership at a level of abstraction that leaves the operational questions to ordinary legislation. The operational legislation, in turn, delegates control to statutory bodies. The vanua ends up as the constitutional owner of land it does not statutorily administer, of minerals it does not statutorily own, and of foreshores and waterbeds that the Crown (State) Lands Act (Cap 132) has classified as State property.

Standing and Litigation

The scope of that displacement is broader than leasing and minerals alone. Section 7 of the TLTA subjects iTaukei land to a large body of regulatory statutes that operate independently of the vanua. The Land Conservation and Improvement Act (Cap 141) empowers a statutory Board to require an owner or occupier to construct and maintain conservation works. The Drainage Act (Cap 143) allows drainage rates to be charged to iTaukei owners. The Local Government Act (Cap 125), at section 94, permits compulsory acquisition of land. The Rivers and Streams Act (Cap 136) provides for easements and water rights on rivers running through iTaukei land. The Town Planning Act (Cap 139) and the Subdivision of Land Act (Cap 140) subject iTaukei land to state planning approvals. The Fisheries Act (Cap 158) asserts jurisdiction over all Fiji fisheries. Each of these instruments quietly narrows the scope of what the vanua can decide about its own territory without state involvement. The displacement is not one framework. It is a pattern of frameworks, all operating through the same statutory hinge.

The 2013 Constitution’s silence on chiefly authority — the subject of FPR’s earlier Tui Nayau piece — is enforced through this legislative pre‑emption. The vanua governs itself, in customary terms, within a framework that has legally re‑allocated most of the governance decisions that would give that self‑government content.

Fiji’s international obligations sit uneasily alongside this. Fiji is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including Article 27 on minority rights, and endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007. Articles 26, 27, and 32 of UNDRIP address indigenous rights to land, resources, and free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) before the state approves projects affecting indigenous territories. UN treaty bodies, including the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, have periodically raised concerns about the Land Use Decree and the diminution of consent requirements in Fiji’s post‑2010 framework. Fiji’s international commitments and its domestic legislative arrangements are not, at present, easily reconciled. That is a further pressure on the current framework which the Constitutional Review Commission cannot have entirely ignored.

The TLTB Reform Submissions of August 2026

By May 2026, the iTaukei Land Trust Board itself made submissions to the Fiji Law Reform Commission seeking amendments to the framework it operates under. The submissions are significant for several reasons.

The TLTB proposed amendments to the Crown (State) Lands Act (Cap 132) to remove foreshores and inland waterbeds from the definition of State land, allowing ownership to revert to the respective iTaukei landowners. Under the current framework, the foreshores adjacent to iTaukei land (the beaches, the shallow reef areas, the mangrove zones) are State property. The waterbeds of rivers and lakes that flow through iTaukei land are also State property. The vanua that has held the land ancestrally does not, under Fijian statutory law, hold the beach in front of it or the riverbed running through it.

The TLTB also proposed amendments to the Mining Act (Cap 146) to return full ownership of minerals to iTaukei landowners and qoliqoli owners. This would reverse the State's constitutional monopoly on subsurface resources. Under the TLTB's proposal, minerals extracted from iTaukei land would be owned by the vanua, not by the State. Royalty payments would flow to the landowners in full rather than as a percentage share.

These submissions came from the state-created statutory body that has administered iTaukei land for eighty-six years. That is analytically important, but requires careful reading, and requires context. The TLTB was not the first or the only voice raising these questions. Similar demands were echoed through oral submissions made by iTaukei chiefs, provincial councils, mataqali representatives, and civil society organisations during the Constitutional Review Commission's public consultation process. What the TLTB submissions did was give those demands institutional form and formal statutory framing. The state-created body was channelling questions that were already circulating in the vanua, not originating them.

Three readings are available. First, the TLTB may have become responsive to the landowner constituency it was created to serve, and is now channelling landowner interests into the reform process. Second, the framework the TLTB administers may now be sufficiently contested that even the delegated body cannot maintain the position that the current arrangement adequately reflects vanua consent. Third, and this reading needs to be named honestly, the TLTB has an institutional interest in expanding its own jurisdiction. Acquiring administrative responsibility over foreshores, waterbeds, and mineral revenue is an expansion of the Board's remit, not a dismantling of the delegated framework. Bureaucracies rarely propose their own abolition.

The three readings are not mutually exclusive. The TLTB is a state-created body, but it is also one that has historically been closely tied to iTaukei chiefly and provincial leadership. It is a site where the interests of the state, the chiefly establishment, and the wider vanua meet, and sometimes diverge. Any analysis of its August 2026 submissions has to account for all three dimensions rather than treat the Board as a straightforward proxy for landowner interests.

What all three readings suggest is that the framework the Constitution delegates is no longer settled, if it ever was.

What This Means for Vanua Governance

The article has thus far treated the vanua as a unitary subject. It is not. Chiefly authority in Fiji is hierarchical, contested, and internally differentiated. Within each vanua, authority is distributed among mataqali, yavusa, and tokatoka, and not all members of a landowning unit necessarily consent to the decisions made in their name.

When that land is administered under a legislative framework that surrenders control to statutory bodies, chiefly authority is bounded twice. Once by the Constitution’s silence — chiefly authority as such has no constitutional status. And once by the statutes — the land the chief speaks for is administered by the TLTB or the Land Use Unit, not by the vanua itself.

This is not a failure of chiefly institutions. The chiefly system continues to function. The vanua continues to hold its ancestral relationship to the land. But the operational decisions — who leases what, on what terms, for how long, on what conditions — are made within a statutory framework that has legally placed the vanua at one remove.

An honest analysis must also acknowledge what “chiefly authority” and “the vanua” mean in practice. The chiefly system in Fiji is hierarchical. It is not democratic in the sense of one member, one vote. Senior chiefs exercise authority over subordinate mataqali and yavusa members in ways that do not necessarily reflect the express consent of every member of the landowning unit. Chiefly recognition of land dealings has historically been a source of intra‑vanua tension as well as external conflict. Any argument for constitutional recognition of chiefly authority has to reckon with the internal governance of that authority — the accountability of chiefs to their people, the treatment of women within decision‑making structures, the position of members who dissent from chiefly decisions. These are questions the vanua itself has always negotiated internally. Constitutional recognition would put them in a new frame.

This has practical consequences. When a lease is granted on iTaukei land, the mataqali receives rent, but the mataqali cannot easily challenge the terms if it later objects to them. When a mining operation begins on iTaukei land, the vanua receives a royalty share, but the vanua does not own the minerals. When the foreshore adjacent to a village is used for a development, the vanua may object, but the foreshore is State land and the vanua’s objection has no statutory standing.

The 2013 Constitution’s protections for iTaukei ownership do genuine constitutional work. They are also, in operational terms, thinner than they appear on the face of the text.

Reform levers — where statutory change would restore vanua control

The following statutory changes would move the framework from pre‑emption to consent and restore direct vanua control over key decisions:

• TLTA s 5(2): Replace the blanket “void” rule with a consent‑based model. Mataqali can negotiate and sign leases, subject to minimum statutory safeguards (registration, environmental/planning compliance), with TLTB shifting to a registry/guarantor role rather than sole authoriser. Add explicit FPIC triggers and a right to withhold consent for specified classes of dealings.
• TLTA s 23(1): Restore direct standing for mataqali/yavusa in lease and benefit disputes, with TLTB as administrator/registrar rather than exclusive litigant. Alternatively, create a dedicated iTaukei Land Tribunal with mataqali as primary parties and TLTB in a supporting/administrative capacity.
• TLTA s 7: Narrow the “statutory hinge” by carving out classes of decisions that require vanua consent (FPIC) before state permits/approvals take effect on iTaukei land. For resources specifically, shift from “State owns minerals; landowners get a royalty share” to “vanua owns/controls extraction subject to national regulation,” or at minimum grant vanua veto/negotiation rights over licensing and benefit‑sharing.
• Land Use Decree 2010: Repeal or substantially amend to (a) require FPIC before designation/lease; (b) restore substantive grounds for refusal beyond mere breach; and (c) remove or narrow privative clauses to allow full legality review (jurisdiction, fairness, reasonableness) in the High Court.
• Mining Act (Cap 146): Amend to vest mineral ownership (or co‑ownership with strong control rights) in the vanua where minerals are found, with the State retaining regulatory oversight only. Statutorily entrench FPIC for exploration/production licences on iTaukei land and mandate benefit‑sharing agreements negotiated directly with mataqali.
• Crown (State) Lands Act (Cap 132): Remove foreshores and inland waterbeds from the definition of State land where they adjoin/flow through iTaukei land, vesting ownership in the respective mataqali/yavusa, subject to navigation/public access safeguards. In the interim, expand consent/benefit rights for foreshore/qoliqoli developments.

The Constitutional Review Commission

The Constitutional Review Commission delivered its Report and Draft Constitution of the Republic of Fiji 2026 to President Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu on 31 August 2026. The President formally handed the report to Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka the same day. The Commission’s terms of reference included the recognition and status of iTaukei institutions. The Great Council of Chiefs had submitted proposals on presidential appointment, chiefly authority, and its own constitutional entrenchment. Chiefs, provincial councils, and iTaukei civil society organisations made submissions of varying scope. The TLTB made its own submission to the Fiji Law Reform Commission, running on a parallel track.

The full CRC Report and the Draft Constitution have not yet been made public. Cabinet is due to consider the Report on 8 September 2026, with Parliament expected to receive the draft when the House sits on 28 September. The National Referendum Bill 2025, which would provide the legal framework for any referendum on constitutional change, remains before the Standing Committee on Justice, Law and Human Rights.

Whatever the CRC has recommended on the vanua’s operational authority over its land — whether the recommendations propose constitutional entrenchment of that authority, whether they address the Land Use Decree 2010 and the 2010 amendments to the Native Land Trust Act, whether they recognise chiefly institutions as constitutional sources — those recommendations are now in the hands of Cabinet and, in due course, Parliament. What the CRC recommends is not itself law. What Parliament does with the recommendations, if anything, will shape the terrain vanua governance operates on for decades.

FPR will report on the CRC Report and the Draft Constitution as soon as they are made public.

Closing

Sections 27, 28, and 30 of the 2013 Constitution protect iTaukei land ownership. They do not, on their own, protect the vanua’s authority to administer that land. That authority sits in the iTaukei Land Trust Act (Cap 134), the Land Use Decree 2010, and their amendments — instruments that have delegated control from the vanua to statutory bodies for reasons that have varied across the decades, but with a consistent constitutional consequence.

The vanua that a chief speaks for owns the land. The vanua does not fully decide what happens on it. That gap is where the Constitution’s silence and the state’s legislation meet. It is where vanua governance actually operates today.

What to watch

• The CRC’s Draft Constitution 2026 and full report are with Cabinet; Parliament will decide whether to adopt any recommendations on chiefly institutions or land administration.
• The government’s review of 26 iTaukei‑affecting laws, framed around UNDRIP and FPIC, could amend the iTaukei Land Trust Act, Land Use Decree, Mining Act and related statutes.
• TLTB’s 2026 submissions seeking return of foreshores/waterbeds and full mineral ownership to landowners test whether the delegated body will channel vanua demands into statutory change.
• Sectoral reforms (State Lands Bill 2026; Commercial Use of Marine Areas Act) signal incremental shifts toward greater benefit and consent rights for customary owners.

FPR’s Vanua section exists to track it.

Lanieta Tukana is the founding editor of the Fiji Political Review. This is the second piece in FPR's Vanua section, following "Ceremony as Constitution: The Tui Nayau and the Limits of Written Sovereignty."

References

Legislation and constitutional instruments

Constitution of the Republic of Fiji 2013, ss 27, 28, 30, 173.

iTaukei Lands Act (Cap 133) (Fiji), formerly Native Lands Act.

iTaukei Land Trust Act (Cap 134) (Fiji), formerly Native Land Trust Act, ss 5(2), 7, 23(1).

Land Use Decree 2010 (No 36) (Fiji).

Native Land Trust (Amendment) Decree 2010 (No 32) (Fiji).

Commercial Use of Marine Areas Act 2026 (Fiji)

Crown (State) Lands Act (Cap 132) (Fiji).

Mining Act (Cap 146) (Fiji).

Petroleum (Exploration and Exploitation) Act (Cap 148) (Fiji).

State Lands Bill 2026 (Fiji).

Forest Act (Cap 150) (Fiji).

Crown Acquisition of Lands Act (Cap 13) (Fiji).

Land Conservation and Improvement Act (Cap 141) (Fiji).

Drainage Act (Cap 143) (Fiji).

Local Government Act (Cap 125) (Fiji), s 94.

Rivers and Streams Act (Cap 136) (Fiji).

Town Planning Act (Cap 139) (Fiji).

Subdivision of Land Act (Cap 140) (Fiji).

Fisheries Act (Cap 158) (Fiji).

Land Transfer Act (Cap 131) (Fiji), s 38.

iTaukei Affairs (Great Council of Chiefs) (Revocation) Regulations 2012 (Fiji).

Institutional sources

iTaukei Land Trust Board, "Clarification on Land Ownership and Mineral Rights in Fiji," tltb.com.fj, May 2026.

iTaukei Land Trust Board — official website, ownership and rights page (tltb.com.fj).

iTaukei Land and Fisheries Commission — Vola ni Kawa Bula records.

Fiji Law Reform Commission — TLTB submissions on State Lands Act and Mining Act amendments, 2026.

Academic and analytical sources

France, Peter. The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Matthew Dodd, "The Land Use Unit: A New Leasing Regime for Customary Land in Fiji" (based on LLB honours dissertation, University of Otago; published USP Discipline of Law).

Matthew Dodd, "Reform of Leasing Regimes for Customary Land in Fiji" (University of Otago LLB honours dissertation).

Keiran Barbalich, "Sugar and Democracy in Fiji: The material foundations of post-colonial authoritarianism 1970-2005" (Victoria University of Wellington MA thesis, 2009).

Aubrey Parke, Rotuma: Custom, Practice and Change: An Exploration of Customary Authorities, the Kinship System, Customary Land Tenure and Other Rights (Coombs Academic Publishing, 2003).

International instruments

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966, Article 27.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, Articles 26, 27, 32.

United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination — periodic concluding observations on Fiji.

Media coverage

"A divisive law," Fiji Times, 14 August 2021.

"iTLTB seeks return of Freehold Land not rightfully obtained, mineral and fisheries rights to rightful landowners," Fijivillage, 6 July 2026.

"TLTB clears confusion over land and mineral ownership," FBC News, August 2026.

Related FPR analysis

Ceremony as Constitution: The Tui Nayau and the Limits of Written Sovereignty, Fiji Political Review, September 2026.

Read more analysis in FPR's Vanua section at fijipoliticalreview.com/vanua