Australia's supreme court awarded indigenous groups the power to partially naturalize people as Australian citizens.

Australia's supreme court awarded indigenous groups the power to partially naturalize people as Australian citizens. The government is seeking to reverse the ruling.

The policy established by the ruling makes no sense in terms of human rights. It can only be understood as a form of discrimination based on ethnicity.

over the 19th century, the English colonists kicked the aboriginals off their land, in many cases by massacring them. This was an enormous crime, Based on the human rights of their descendants, who continue to be harmed by that crime, it calls for reparations to them.

Those descendants are the same indigenous people who compose the groups which have been granted this special power -- but that we should not think of that power as implementing the necessary reparations, because (1) it will help only a few of those who are due reparations, and (2) rather than reducing the preexisting inequality, it creates an additional form of inequality.