Once the Waitangi Tribunal has accepted and registered your claim, the Tribunal will start the process of assessing the claim. The Tribunal will contact you (the claimant or claimants), citing the claim’s assigned ‘Wai’ number (short for Waitangi Tribunal claim number). The Crown and interested parties will also be notified of the claim.

If the claim submitted is similar to other claims, the claims may be grouped together in a single inquiry. Often, not all parts of a claim will be inquired into in a single inquiry and the claim will be included in multiple inquiries.

Claims related to issues in a particular region are typically inquired into as part of a district inquiry. Claims related to topics of broader national policy – such as housing, health, the justice system and mana wāhine – may be inquired into as part of a kaupapa (thematic) inquiry.

After the relevant people are all notified, there may be a stage where research is done by the Tribunal, the claimants, and the Crown.

Then hearings are held so that the Tribunal can hear evidence from you to support your claim, as well as evidence from the Crown and from expert witnesses. During a hearing, evidence is usually given by iwi members, lawyers, and historians or other specialists. Tribunal members listen to the evidence and consider whether and how the principles of te Tiriti may have been breached.

When it’s finished assessing the claim, the Tribunal will release its findings and recommendations in the form of a report. The claimants and the Crown can then consider how they will respond to the Tribunal’s report.

Following a district inquiry, a Tribunal report can be used by the Crown and claimants to negotiate a Treaty settlement. Claimants can also choose to skip having a Tribunal inquiry and, instead, negotiate directly with the Crown.

Settlements acknowledge historical claims (including breaches of the Treaty and the various effects of this wrongdoing on Māori) and offer a settlement package that includes financial compensation and other measures to address the harm that was done.

Past settlements have enhanced iwi cultural and commercial development, including for Waikato Tainui, Ngāi Tahu, and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. The settlements have helped to restore the economic base of iwi and, more broadly, to create mechanisms to protect iwi and Māori interests.

Settlements have, at times, included innovative measures – for example, recognition of both Te Urewera and the Whanganui River as legal “persons”. Granting legal personality to awa, maunga or rohe in this way is intended to give iwi the legal right and means to protect them (see: “Legal personality for maunga, awa and other natural features of the land”).

Settlement negotiations are facilitated by Te Tari Whakatau: The Office of Treaty Settlement and Takutai Moana. Each settlement is different, to acknowledge and address different forms of loss, but they almost always include:

• an account of what happened in the past, or the substance of a breach in a contemporary claim
• a written apology by the Crown
• some form of compensation or other redress, usually including money and, if land was confiscated, the return of Crown-owned land.

After your claim is registered, it can be many years, or even decades, before the Tribunal begins inquiring into it. The inquiry itself then may involve years of planning, research, hearings, and report-writing before finding and recommendations are finally delivered to the government. The slowness of the process is mainly because of the number of claims that have been made, the under-resourcing of the Tribunal, and the complexity of many of the issues raised in claims.

For activists it is therefore worth considering the Treaty claim pathway as one part of a wider strategy. Your strategy might include elements of direct action alongside the slow, but vital, work of Waitangi Tribunal investigations.

The most effective way to get some rapid action through the Treaty claim process is to look at the Tribunal’s urgency process. The Tribunal will only establish an urgent inquiry if your claim is time-sensitive – for example, it relates to a government plan to change the law in the near future. You must also be ready to go to hearing and be able to show that you have no other reasonable options to seek redress. Urgent inquiries typically start very quickly, do not involve new research, have only a limited number of days of hearings, and issue their findings and recommendations shortly after hearings finish.