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II. THE LEGAL BASIS FOR RESTITUTION CLAIMS 11. Ever since the age of discovery began in the 15th Century, and for much of the time before that, although more localised, the violent conquest of land or territory was a common feature of geopolitics that resulted in huge transfers of land - indeed sometimes entire continents - resulting in the extra-legal principle of: To the victor go the spoils. For hundreds of years from the opening of the Americas in 1400s and then the rest of the non-European world after that, the so-called rules of the game in place at the time dictated that any dispossession that occurred through the process of colonialisation and/or armed conflict meant individuals, families, villages and even entire peoples lost their housing, land and property for good. Indeed, much of the way the world is organised and virtually all of the internationally recognised borders upon which the entire international legal system is premised have as their origins colonial conquest, occupation and military domination. For hundreds of years all colonial powers, but certainly not those they conquered, agreed tacitly and sometimes formally between themselves that persons, families and communities who were displaced and/or lost their possessions due to their actions, whether through conquest by the British Empire, French overseas territories in Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, the Portuguese Empire in Africa and Asia, the Ottoman Empire, the Dutch East Indies Company, the Soviet Union, the United States and so many others would transfer ownership and control of their traditional lands to the more powerful colonial powers. These processes resulted ultimately in the transfer of wealth measured today in many trillions of dollars and remain a key determinant as to why the highly skewed economic wealth and political power of the global North/western world today continues to exist to this day. 12. For a brief and hopeful window of time, however, these long-standing practices grounded in the principles of ‘might is right’ or ‘victors justice’ changed for the better. In just the past three decades matters have shifted in remarkable ways, whereby the theft of HLP assets were increasingly seen as the law intended them to be seen as unlawful and illegitimate. With the end of the Cold War in 1989 and developments in the immediate aftermath of that historical turning point, it was increasingly accepted that dispossessed or otherwise displaced persons were not simply entitled to return to their countries of origin or allowed some form of temporary humanitarian access to their original homes, but that they also have a legally enforceable right to return to, recover, repossess, re-assert control over and reside in - should they wish - the homes, lands and properties they had earlier fled or from which they had been displaced; the implementation of the process known as restitutio in integrum. Where this was independently considered to be what is called materially impossible due to, for instance, the construction of an expensive shopping mall on the land that belonged to a displaced person, international law principles meant that people would then have a right to just and satisfactory financial and other forms of compensation or reparation in lieu of the physical return to or recovery of the HLP asset concerned.
