Sydney - An Australian court yesterday rejected a claim for compensation by two Aborigines taken from their families as children, potentially frustrating hundreds of other similar claims.
In a historic ruling, the Northern Territory Federal Court said the government was not liable to pay Mr Peter Gunner and Mrs Lorna Cubillo the compensation and punitive damages they had sought for psychological trauma, emotional distress and cultural isolation.
"As a result of my findings each of the claims that have been made by Mrs Cubillo and by Mr Gunner must be dismissed," Federal Court Judge Maurice O'Loughlin said in a verdict broadcast live on television, radio and the Internet.
He said he did not doubt they were removed from their families to be raised as whites in an official assimilation policy which led to the so-called "Stolen Generations". But he said there was a lack of evidence to find the government had acted against their best interests. The law at that time allowed the authorities to take part-Aboriginal children into care, even if it was against the family's wishes.
The Aboriginal community, Australia's most disadvantaged group and which accounts for about 2.1 per cent of Australia's 19 million population, vowed to fight on and may appeal. "It is the white man's legal system, the Western system that has been in operation for many, many years and we have to look at another way of helping our people," an Aboriginal leader, Ms Audrey Kinnear Ngingali, co-chair of the indigenous National Sorry Day Committee, told reporters. Mrs Cubillo (62), and Mr Gunner (53) claimed that laws allowing their removal had been misused and they had suffered unhappy childhoods and abuse as a result.