85 considered ‘property’ for the purposes of Article 14 of the Charter. The African Commission in the Ogoni case also found that the ‘right to property’ includes not only the right to have access to one’s 86 property and not to have one’s property invaded or encroached upon, but also the right to 87 undisturbed possession, use and control of such property however the owner(s) deem fit. The African Commission also notes that the ECHR have recognised that ‘property rights’ could also include 88 the economic resources and rights over the common land of the applicants. 187. The Complainants argue that both international and domestic courts have recognised that indigenous groups have a specific form of land tenure that creates a particular set of problems. Common problems faced by indigenous groups include the lack of “formal” title recognition of their historic territories, the failure of domestic legal systems to acknowledge communal property rights, and the claiming of formal legal title to indigenous land by the colonial authorities. This, they argue, has led to many cases of displacement from a people’s historic territory, both by colonial authorities and postcolonial states relying on the legal title they inherited from the colonial authorities. The African Commission notes that its Working Group on Indigenous Populations/Communities has recognised that some African minorities do face dispossession of their lands and that special measures are 89 necessary in order to ensure their survival in accordance with their traditions and customs. The African Commission is of the view that the first step in the protection of traditional African communities is the acknowledgement that the rights, interests and benefits of such communities in their traditional lands constitute ‘property’under the Charter and that special measures may have to be taken to secure such ‘property rights’. 90 188. The case of Dogan and others v Turkey is instructive in the instant communication. Although the applicants were unable to demonstrate registered title of lands from which they had been forcibly evicted by the Turkish authorities, the European Court of Human Rights observed that: [T]he notion ‘possessions’ in Article 1 has an autonomous meaning which is certainly not limited to ownership of physical goods: certain other rights and interests constituting assets can also be 91 regarded as ‘property rights’, and thus as ‘possessions’ for the purposes of this provision. 189. Although they did not have registered property, they either had their own houses constructed on the land of their ascendants or lived in the houses owned by their fathers and cultivate the land belonging to the latter. The Court further noted that the applicants had unchallenged rights over the common land in the village, such as the pasture, grazing and the forest land, and that they earned their living from stockbreeding and tree-felling. 190. The African Commission also notes the observation of the IActHR in the seminal case of The 92 Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni v Nicaragua , that the Inter-American Convention protected property rights in a sense which include the rights of members of the indigenous communities within the framework of communal property and argued that possession of the land should suffice for indigenous communities lacking real title to obtain official recognition of that property. 191. In the opinion of the African Commission, the Respondent State has an obligation under Article 14 of the African Charter not only to respect the ‘right to property’, but also to protect that right. In 93 ‘the Mauritania Cases’, the African Commission concluded that the confiscation and pillaging of the property of black Mauritanians and the expropriation or destruction of their land and houses before forcing them to go abroad constituted a violation of the right to property as guaranteed in Article 14. 94 Similarly, in The Ogoni case 2001 the African Commission addressed factual situations involving removal of people from their homes. The African Commission held that the removal of people from their homes violated Article 14 of the African Charter, as well as the right to adequate housing which, 95 although not explicitly expressed in the African Charter, is also guaranteed by Article 14. 192. The Saramaka case also sets out how the failure to recognise an indigenous/tribal group 96 becomes a violation of the ‘right to property.’ In its analysis of whether the State of Suriname had adopted an appropriate framework to give domestic legal effect to the ‘right to property’, the IACtHR addressed the following issues: This controversy over who actually represents the Saramaka people is precisely a natural 97 consequence of the lack of recognition of their juridical personality. 193. In the Saramaka case, the State of Suriname did not recognise that the Saramaka people can enjoy and exercise property rights as a community. The Court observed that other communities in