KUCHING, Oct 31 2025: Native customary rights (NCR) land activist Peter John Jaban has urged the state government to take immediate steps to resolve Native Customary Rights (NCR) land disputes that are being prolonged due to bureaucratic red tape, causing immense suffering and injustice to the rightful landowners.
Peter John Jaban: The state government should establish an independent review mechanism to ensure that bureaucratic procedures never override the rights of indigenous landowners.
In this connection, he suggested that the state government streamline the NCR land recognition process, cutting down unnecessary steps and overlapping jurisdictions between the relevant government agencies.
He also said the state government set strict timelines for land verification, surveying and gazettement.
He suggested that the state government empowers local land offices and community representatives to handle disputes quickly and transparently.
He said the state government should establish an independent review mechanism to ensure that bureaucratic procedures never override the rights of indigenous landowners.
“The state government should also provide sufficient funding to fund the employment of more
magistrates and equip Native Courts with an up to date equipment to upgrade the current
Situation,” he said in a statement today.
He lamented that for decades, NCR landowners have been trapped in an endless cycle of paperwork,
delayed verification, overlapping claims, and weak coordination between the relevant government agencies.
“Many of them are elderly, waiting their entire lives for recognition and titles that never come,” he said in a statement today, adding that some even lost their ancestral land to encroachment and development while government files move at a snail’s pace.
Peter stressed that this was despite the much touted effort by the state government to revamp the Native Court system, even though a special committee has been appointed to reshape the Native Court system to be on par with the civil court.
“But to-date no positive move has been seen to that effect,” he said, adding that there is even shortage of magistrates to handle all native and NCR cases in Sarawak as those former magistrates who are over 70 years of age have been phased out.
He noted that only a handful of magistrates are still in service.
He also said there should sufficient funding to assist the Native Court system to be more effective not only to employ more magistrates but for other matters for the administration of justice.
Peter also noted that some cases in the Native courts have been delayed for proceedings and decisions of up to over three years or more due to the acute shortage of magistrates.
He said some disgruntled litigants gave expressed lack of confidence in the Native Court system to serve their rights, adding that the bureaucratic delay is not just inefficiency, but it is also a denial of justice.
“When rightful owners cannot obtain land titles or defend their territory because of slow processes, the system itself becomes complicit in their loss.
“As rightly put by the former prime minister of British the late William Ewart Gladstone who once said that justice delayed is justice denied,” Peter said.
He urged the Dayak state ministers to assist the state government and its agencies and to report on the development of the revamping of the Natives Court system so to give confidence to the NCR land owners and the public at large.
He said the natives people have heard countless promises of land reform, surveys, and mapping
exercises and yet every initiative gets stuck between departments, legal reviews, and approval
chains that take years to resolve.
“This must end,” he said.
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