The land has been mined for around 70 years

South Africa's highest court said the Richtersveld community had been removed under racist laws and was entitled to have land and mineral rights returned.

The ruling ends a five-year battle with the state mining company Alexkor.

Campaigners say the decision could have repercussions in other countries where tribal lands are exploited for mineral wealth.

Lawyers for the state told local media that the ruling could leave a 10bn-rand ($1.4bn) hole in the government budget.

In its judgement, the Constitutional Court said: "The Richtersveld Community is entitled... to restitution of the right to ownership of the subject land (including its minerals and precious stones) and to the exclusive beneficial use and occupation thereof."

Nomad eviction

The Richtersveld area in the Northern Cape includes a narrow stretch of mineral-rich land along the Orange River that forms the border between South Africa and Namibia.

After diamonds were discovered on the land of the nomadic Richtersveld people in the 1920s, they were moved off and a mine was opened.

Today will be recorded by history as the most important victory for indigenous peoples for many years Stephen Corry Survival International

Alexkor, which mines the land and adjacent seabed, was awarded title to the land in 1991 by the white South African government.

The 3,000-strong Richtersveld group, part of the wider Khoikhoi peoples previously known pejoratively as "Hottentots", now lives in four villages set aside for them.

Attorney Henk Smith, of the Legal Resources Centre which represented the community, said their right to restitution would now be translated into a package consisting the transfer of ownership rights and compensation.

"You have to look at how much compensation the community would have received had they been the owners in the past 75 years," he told French news agency AFP.

After the apartheid regime came to an end in 1994, a Land Claims Court was set up to help restore ownership to millions of people forcibly removed from their homes under racist laws.

Implications

Lawyers representing the government and the mining company had argued that the decision could bring into question the ownership of all colonised land in South Africa.

Survival International, which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples around the world, welcomed the court ruling.

Survival's director, Stephen Corry, told BBC News Online:

"Indigenous, unwritten, law is now recognised as having proper standing in a 21st century law court. Proper enough to get land back for the Richtersveld people after nearly half a century - with rights to the minerals as well."

Mr Corry said the ruling was bound to have "incalculable implications in places like Botswana where the government is throwing Bushmen off their ancestral land today".

"Diamond companies, like De Beers, with exploration rights over Bushman territory should realise that they're operating on someone else's land," he said.