Does Length of Residence Decide Whether an Expulsion Is Lawful? Reading the Treaty Clauses, the Land Codes and the Compensation File

Arguments about who belongs somewhere are often settled, in conversation, with a number of years. The instruments that govern forced displacement do not contain one: Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory,” and does so “regardless of their motive,” without setting any minimum or maximum term of residence anywhere in its text. Duration is legally operative elsewhere, in property law, and in the 1948 case it ran against the displaced rather than for them: the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 put arable land left fallow for three consecutive years into the tapu process, and Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 assigned status by where a person stood on named dates. The scale the question assumes is itself on the record, at 711,000 refugees on the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine’s estimate of September 1949.

Key Findings

• Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits mass forcible transfer and deportation from occupied territory “regardless of their motive,” and states no term of residence; the Rome Statute of 1998 defines deportation or forcible transfer at Article 7(2)(d) by whether the displaced were “lawfully present,” not by how long.
• The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated 711,000 refugees from Israel-controlled territory in a technical report dated 7 September 1949, published in its General Progress Report of 23 October 1950.
• Duration is a live legal test in land law: Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 turned ten years of undisturbed possession into a prescriptive right, and Article 68 put arable land left fallow for three successive years into the tapu process.
• The Conciliation Commission’s Refugee Office valued abandoned Arab property at £P100,383,784 over 16,324 square kilometres in September 1951, priced as at 29 November 1947, and expressly declined to build the estimate on the Custodian of Absentee Property’s records.
• Where length of presence does carry legal weight, in the indigenous-rights instruments, the criterion is descent from the inhabitants at a named historical moment rather than a count of years; the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 13 September 2007 by 143 votes to 4, with 11 abstentions.

Does any law make an expulsion lawful after enough years?

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not,” and adds that this holds “regardless of their motive.” The clause carries no term of years. Its trigger is protected status and the act.

The same structure recurs in the later instrument. The Rome Statute of 1998 lists deportation or forcible transfer of population among crimes against humanity at Article 7(1)(d), and defines it at Article 7(2)(d) as “forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law.” The qualifier is lawful presence, a status a person either holds or does not on the day in question. Article 8(2)(a)(vii) makes unlawful deportation or transfer a grave breach. Neither article asks how long anyone had been there.

Two limits belong with that. The Fourth Geneva Convention was adopted on 12 August 1949, after the events of 1947 to 1949, so it is not the law that governed those events at the time, and the Rome Statute postdates them by half a century. And the prohibition in Article 49 is drafted for occupied territory and protected persons, categories that have to be established before the clause reaches anything.

On the 1948 case specifically, the Israel Law Review records in its article “1948 Refugees” that in the course of the Zionist and Israeli military operations about 400 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, resulting in the expulsion and flight of about 80% of the residents of the Palestinian regions on which the State of Israel was established. That is a share of the residents of those regions, not of Mandate Palestine as a whole. The dispute the peer-reviewed literature actually conducts over those events concerns the act and its authorship, which is where the instruments point.

Is it often said that long residence settles the question?

It is often said that a population’s long habitation makes its removal illegitimate, and the displacement the argument rests on is real and larger than “hundreds of thousands” on every named estimate. The Conciliation Commission’s Technical Committee on Refugees put the figure at approximately 711,000 in a report submitted at Lausanne on 7 September 1949.

That estimate is the floor of the published range, not its centre, and the bodies behind the other figures counted different things.

These are four separate constructions by four bodies and they are not summed, averaged or spliced into one series. The Commission’s own count excludes people displaced inside Israel, because it counts refugees from Israel-controlled territory, and its authors described it as only “as accurate as circumstances permit.”

So the premise’s factual core stands. What does not follow from it is the inference. Read across the instruments and the archives, the argument is never about tenure length: Morris (2004) attributes the exodus to multiple causes varying by locality and phase, including military attack, fear of attack, expulsions in certain sectors, and flight, and rejects both a single master expulsion plan and the claim that departures were voluntary; Pappé (2006) argues the displacement was a planned ethnic cleansing. Those two poles disagree about what was done and by whom. Neither turns on how long the displaced had lived there, and neither would be resolved by establishing it.

Where does the figure of 1,300 years come from?

No official record and no peer-reviewed study establishes 1,300 years as a measured duration of continuous Palestinian residence. The oldest enumeration either statistical office rests on is recent by comparison: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on 1 December 2017, in the third census that authority has ever conducted.

The Bureau’s own rounds are 1997, 2007 and 2017, the authority itself having been established after the Oslo Accords, and Palestinian figures for years before 1997 have no census basis at all, being modelled or back-estimated. On the Israeli side, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported a Moslem population of 1.707 million at the end of 2021, 18.1% of all residents, and approximately 184,200 Christians in December 2025, about 1.9% of the population, in each case a present-day headcount rather than a tenure record. No register on either side records how long anybody’s ancestors were resident, because no register was built to.

Counted back from 2026, 1,300 years reaches 726. Nothing in the statistical apparatus of either party covers that span, and the question of continuous Palestinian presence is worked out in named scholarship rather than in an enumeration.

Even the Mandate-era figures most often reached for are approximations offered inside an argument. The Palestine Royal Commission, reporting in July 1937, wrote that “About 1,000,000 Arabs are in strife, open or latent, with some 400,000 Jews,” and the report writes both as approximations in an argumentative passage rather than as an enumeration.

The absence has a straightforward explanation and it is worth stating plainly rather than filling. Duration of residence is not a quantity any official statistical office has ever been asked to produce, because no instrument makes anything turn on it. A figure with no legal consequence attached generates no register, and a register that does not exist cannot be cited.

Where does the law actually count years of residence?

Duration is a live and operative legal test, and the place to find it is land law. Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 provides that “If a person has possessed Arazi Mirie and Mevkufe for ten years without disturbance his prescriptive right (Hak Karar) becomes proved,” in the English translation of F. Ongley revised by Horace E. Miller, published in London in 1892.

Article 68 runs the other way. Where an owner “allows it to lie fallow for three successive years without having proved any valid excuse,” the land “becomes the right of Tapu,” at which point the former possessor may recover it on payment and, only if he declines, it passes at auction to another holder. Article 103 applies a separate three-year rule to dead land granted for reclamation and then left unopened.

The 1858 code counts years over dirt, not over people, and it counts a person’s absence from cultivation rather than the length of their family’s presence.

The 1950 statutes did not count years at all. Geremy Forman and Alexandre Kedar record, in their 2004 study in Environment and Planning D, that the Knesset enacted the Absentee Property Law in March 1950 and the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law in July 1950, and that the absentee definition reached anyone who, on or after 29 November 1947, had been a national of an Arab country at war with Israel, present in one of those countries or in any part of Palestine outside the regulations’ jurisdiction, or “a citizen of Palestine who abandoned his or her normal place of residence.” The authors place that definition in the 1948 regulations the statute replaced and carried forward.

The result, in their words: “practically no Jewish Israelis, but tens of thousands of Arab Israeli citizens, were classified as absentees, assuming the paradoxical legal identity of ‘present absentee’.” A test keyed to a date rather than to a duration reached people who had never left the country.

Does time extinguish a displaced person’s claim?

The published legal scholarship splits, and neither pole rests on tenure. Victor Tadros, in Politics, Philosophy & Economics in 2017, argues that the current generation of Palestinians retains a significant interest in return and that their rights are not diminished in proportion as that interest is diminished; Andrew Kent, in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law in 2012, argues the opposite side of the same doctrinal question.

The two are not symmetrical in kind and should not be presented as though they were. Tadros is peer-reviewed normative philosophy and stops short of the conclusion commonly attributed to it: his published abstract states that the article “does not defend the duty on Israel to permit return,” and that whether such a duty exists “depends on whether the economic, social and security costs override that right.” Kent’s is a student-edited law review article rather than a peer-reviewed one, and it assumes its factual premises about 1947 to 1949 for the sake of argument rather than establishing them.

What did not lapse with time is the documentary file. The Conciliation Commission’s Refugee Office completed a global evaluation in September 1951, reported in the Commission’s working paper of 2 October 1961, estimating the abandoned land that had passed to Jewish hands at 16,324 square kilometres, of which 4,574 square kilometres were cultivable.

The Office chose 29 November 1947 as the valuation date because it was “the last date before the exodus of refugees when land values in Palestine were reasonably stable,” built the extent estimate from the Mandatory government’s Village Statistics 1945, and warned that the estimates “must inevitably be regarded as approximate ones.” Frank D. Lewis, in Explorations in Economic History in 2007, re-valued non-agricultural property from transfer prices and tax payable and reports amounts “much higher than those derived by the United Nations Conciliation Commission in 1951.”

Does prior occupancy ever strengthen a legal claim?

There is one body of law where length of presence carries weight, and it is the indigenous-rights regime. The General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 13 September 2007 by 143 votes to 4, with 11 abstentions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States voting against.

Even here the criterion is not a number of years. Article 1(1)(b) of the International Labour Organisation’s Convention No. 169 of 1989 reaches peoples who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present State boundaries, and who retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions. That is descent from the inhabitants at a named historical moment, coupled with institutional continuity. It is a status test, not a duration test, and no threshold of years appears in it.

What the status confers is also narrower than the question assumes. Article 10 of the 2007 Declaration provides that indigenous peoples “shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories,” and that no relocation shall take place without their free, prior and informed consent and after agreement on just and fair compensation, with the option of return where possible. That is a prohibition plus a consent and compensation regime, reached by the same route as Article 49: through the act and the consent, not through the calendar.

So the one regime that does look backwards at presence produces a bar on removal rather than a licence for it, and it reaches that bar without counting years. Who qualifies under those criteria in this particular case is a separate and contested question, examined in the Institute’s report on indigeneity claims and the treaty criteria.

What does Israel’s founding text claim about presence?

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read on 14 May 1948, grounds the new state in a chain of named instruments rather than in a term of years, and its recitals run from the First Zionist Congress convened by Theodor Herzl to a General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947 that the text calls “irrevocable.”

The same text addresses the population already present in terms of rights rather than tenure. It pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” in the Knesset’s published English text, and it appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” The two official English translations differ on one word in the equality clause, the Knesset publishing “all its citizens” and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs “all its inhabitants,” so the text quoted here is the Knesset’s.

The entitlement statute that followed is likewise status-based. Section 1 of the Law of Return, 5710-1950, provides that “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh,” and section 4B, inserted by Amendment No. 2 in 1970, defines a Jew for the purposes of that Law as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” Section 4A extends the same rights to a child, grandchild or spouse of a Jew. None of it counts years of residence, in either direction: a person qualifies by descent or conversion, not by tenure, and the length of anyone else’s tenure is not a variable the statute contains.

The pattern holds across the earlier British record too. The Palestine Royal Commission, signing its report on 22 June 1937, concluded that the obligations undertaken to Arabs and Jews “have proved irreconcilable” and returned “to Partition as the only method we are able to propose for dealing with the root of the trouble,” proposing a frontier between two sovereign states in a territory both populations inhabited. The recommendation turned on the line, not on which population had been there longer.

Has any court ruled on the 1948 expulsion question?

No court has ruled on whether the 1948 displacement was lawful, and none has been asked to measure how long the displaced had lived there. Israel’s own Supreme Court has adjudicated land taken later: in HCJ 390/79, decided 22 October 1979, a five-justice panel annulled an order of possession over the registered plots of seventeen Palestinian petitioners at the village of Rujeib.

The reasoning there is a study in which variables a court does weigh. The Deputy President held that possession of privately owned land for a civilian settlement is potentially justified under Article 52 of the Hague Regulations, but only “when it is proved, according to the facts of the case, that military needs were those which in practice brought upon the decision,” and the petition succeeded because the political level had initiated the settlement and the military had endorsed the site afterwards. In HCJ 6698/95, decided 8 March 2000, the same court declared that the State “was not permitted, by law, to allocate state land to the Jewish Agency, for the purpose of establishing the communal settlement of Katzir on the basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.” Ownership, authority, purpose and equality all carried weight. Length of residence appears in neither judgment.

At the international level the closest adjudicated record concerns a different period. The International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion on 19 July 2024 on the legal consequences of Israeli policies and practices in the territory occupied since 1967, holding by eleven votes to four, in the narrowest of its nine separately voted subparagraphs, that the continued presence there is unlawful. That opinion is advisory rather than binding, and its subject matter begins in 1967.

For 1948 the file was handled by a conciliation body rather than a tribunal. The Conciliation Commission counted refugees, sampled claims and valued property, and its Refugee Office declined to rest the valuation on the Custodian of Absentee Property’s records because “it would be inappropriate to assess compensation entirely on the basis of information furnished by an interested party.” That is a procedural finding about evidence, not a determination of legality. The substantive disagreement over what happened to Palestinians in 1948 has been conducted in the archival literature, between Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006), over plan and causation.

Methodology

This report answers a question about what legal instruments contain, so its primary sources are the instruments themselves: the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the Rome Statute of 1998, the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 in the Ongley translation revised by Miller and published in 1892, the Absentee Property Law and Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law of 1950 as set out in Forman and Kedar (2004), the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel of 14 May 1948 in the Knesset’s published English text, the Law of Return, 5710-1950 with its 1970 amendment, International Labour Organisation Convention No. 169 of 1989, and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted on 13 September 2007. Recorded votes and court judgments are cited as records of what was decided.

Several translation and text limits carry into the prose. There is no official English text of the Ottoman Land Code, since the Ottoman state issued none; Ongley (1892) is a private British translation, and the parallel Fisher translation of 1919 renders the recovery payment under Article 68 differently. The Knesset marks its Basic Law translations unofficial and the two official English texts of the 1948 Declaration differ on one word in the equality clause. The full English text of the Geneva Conventions is not published on any United States or Swiss federal host that this programme treats as citable, and the depositary’s own portal serves no document text; the wording of Article 49 is quoted here from the treaty text as it circulates through the custodial and legal literature.

Figures carry the scope their publishers gave them. The Conciliation Commission’s 711,000 is an estimate for refugees from Israel-controlled territory, not a census, and excludes people displaced inside Israel; its 1951 sampling survey covers refugees in Jordan only and rests on claims its own authors record as “unchecked and not documented”; its 1961 valuation is described by the Refugee Office as approximate. Forman and Kedar state plainly that “There is no one agreed-upon figure for the land that moved from Arab hands to the state in the wake of 1948,” and this report does not supply one.

Where the literature disagrees it is named rather than resolved. Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006) hold opposite positions on whether the 1948 departures followed a plan. Tadros (2017), peer-reviewed and sourced here from its published abstract, and Kent (2012), a student-edited law review article, hold opposite positions on what elapsed time does to a claim of return. Lewis (2007) is likewise abstract-sourced and no figure from its body is reproduced. The 1,300-year figure in the question was searched for as a measured or legally operative quantity and none was located; that is recorded here as an absence rather than filled.

Conclusion

So does a number of years settle it? The instruments do not contain one. Article 49 of the 1949 Convention prohibits mass forcible transfer “regardless of their motive,” and the Rome Statute’s definition turns on whether the displaced were lawfully present, so a reader who supplies 1,300 years, or 13, has supplied a figure the clause has no slot for.

Where the law does count years, it counts them over land rather than over people, and in 1948 it counted them against those who had gone. Three fallow years under Article 68 of the 1858 code put arable land into the tapu process; ten years of undisturbed possession under Article 78 matured into a prescriptive right; and then came a statute that asked only where a person stood on 29 November 1947, a test that reached tens of thousands of people who had never left the country. Meanwhile the Conciliation Commission put 711,000 refugees and 16,324 square kilometres on the record within three years, valued the property at £P100,383,784 as at November 1947, and refused to build the count on an interested party’s files. The indigenous-rights instruments, the one place where prior presence is a criterion, reach a bar on forcible removal by way of descent and consent, and never by way of a term of years.

What none of it contains is the variable the question offers. That absence is worth sitting with, because arguments of this shape are made in both directions and by all sides: a duration is produced, and the listener is invited to treat it as the thing that decides. If the enacted texts, the land codes, the compensation file and the court records all reach their results without it, what is the number doing when someone supplies it?

Frequently Asked Questions

Which treaty first prohibited mass forcible transfer from occupied territory?

The Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted on 12 August 1949, carries the prohibition at Article 49, which bars “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory,” regardless of motive. It postdates the 1947 to 1949 events in Palestine by a year and is therefore not the law that governed them at the time.

Why does the Rome Statute say “lawfully present” rather than “long resident”?

Article 7(2)(d) of the Rome Statute of 1998 defines deportation or forcible transfer as displacement of persons “from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law.” Lawful presence is a status a person holds or does not hold on a given day, which makes the element provable from a residence or citizenship record rather than from a genealogy.

How many Palestinian families filed property claims, and where were they counted?

The Conciliation Commission’s working paper of 12 April 1951 sampled the fact-sheets issued to the 84,000 heads of refugee families in Jordan, about 540,000 persons. It found 34% of those families claiming no property at all and 66% claiming buildings or land, with total land claimed of 3,508,540 dunums. The frame is refugees in Jordan only, not all 1948 refugees.

What is a “present absentee” under Israeli law?

Forman and Kedar (2004) use the term for Arab citizens of Israel classified as absentees under the 1950 property legislation while remaining physically in the country, because the statutory test keyed to presence at a normal place of residence on or after 29 November 1947. Their finding is that practically no Jewish Israelis but tens of thousands of Arab Israeli citizens fell into the category.

Why does the Palestinian statistical authority have no census before 1997?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has conducted three censuses, in 1997, 2007 and 2017, the authority itself having been established after the Oslo Accords. Population figures for the territory before 1997 are modelled or back-estimated rather than enumerated, which is why no Palestinian-published headcount exists for earlier decades.

How much has actually been recorded as paid out on the 1948 property file?

The Conciliation Commission’s 1961 working paper records that release of Arab refugee bank accounts blocked in Israel began in the summer of 1953 and that £2,633,175 of those accounts had been released by 31 August 1956. That is a released balance on bank accounts and is a different quantity from compensation for land or buildings, which the same paper values separately.

Which scholars disagree about whether the 1948 departures were planned?

Benny Morris, in the second edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press, 2004), attributes the exodus to causes varying by locality and phase and rejects a single master expulsion plan. Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006), argues the displacement was a planned ethnic cleansing. Both are named poles of a live scholarly dispute over causation.

Sources

• Fischbach, Michael R., 2003. Records of Dispossession: Palestinian Refugee Property and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, Institute for Palestine Studies Series. ISBN 9780231129787. Scholarly book.
• Forman, Geremy, and Alexandre Kedar, 2004. From Arab Land to ‘Israel Lands’: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(6), pp. 809 to 830. DOI 10.1068/d402. Peer-reviewed.
• International Labour Organisation, 1989. Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (No. 169). Treaty text.
• Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2022. The Moslem Population in Israel: Data on the Occasion of Eid al-Adha. Media Release 217/2022, Jerusalem, 6 July 2022. Official record.
• Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Christmas 2025: Christians in Israel. Media Release 413/2025, Jerusalem, 24 December 2025. Official record.
• Israel Law Review. 1948 Refugees. Cambridge University Press. cambridge.org/core/journals/israel-law-review. Peer-reviewed.
• Israeli Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice, 1979. HCJ 390/79 Dweikat and others v. The State of Israel and others, judgment of 22 October 1979. Court judgment.
• Israeli Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice, 2000. HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration, judgment of 8 March 2000. Court judgment.
• Kent, Andrew, 2012. Evaluating the Palestinians’ Claimed Right of Return. University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, 34(1), p. 149. Student-edited law review article, not peer-reviewed.
• Knesset, 1950 and 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. Sefer Ha-Chukkim No. 51 and No. 586. Enacted legislation, English text published by the Knesset.
• Lewis, Frank D., 2007. Compensation and the abandoned property of the 1948 Palestinian refugees: Assessment and implications. Explorations in Economic History, 44(4), pp. 523 to 537. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
• Morris, Benny, 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Middle East Studies 18. ISBN 9780521009676. Scholarly book.
• Ottoman Empire, 1858. The Ottoman Land Code of 7 Ramazan 1274, translated by F. Ongley, revised by Horace E. Miller. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1892. Enacted legislation, unofficial English translation.
• Palestine Royal Commission, 1937. Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, Cmd. 5479. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, presented to Parliament July 1937, signed 22 June 1937. Official record.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017: Final Results. Ramallah. Official record.
• Pappé, Ilan, 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette No. 1, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948, English text published by the Knesset. Primary and official record.
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Articles 7(1)(d), 7(2)(d) and 8(2)(a)(vii). Treaty text.
• Tadros, Victor, 2017. The Persistence of the Right of Return. Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 16(4), pp. 375 to 399. DOI 10.1177/1470594X17736265. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1950. General Progress Report and Supplementary Report, A/1367/Rev.1, covering 11 December 1949 to 23 October 1950, Appendix 4 dated 7 September 1949. Official record.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1951. Sampling Survey of Abandoned Property Claimed by Arab Refugees, working paper A/AC.25/W/60, 12 April 1951. Official record.
• United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, 1961. Historical Survey of Efforts to Secure the Implementation of Paragraph 11 of General Assembly Resolution 194 (III): Question of compensation, working paper A/AC.25/W/81/Rev.2, 2 October 1961. Official record.
• United Nations General Assembly, 2007. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, resolution 61/295, adopted by recorded vote on 13 September 2007, Article 10. Official record.
• Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949, Article 49. Treaty text.