Australian Aborigines have welcomed a plan to set up a panel to oversee the repatriation of human remains held by British museums and universities.

But they say a wider inquiry is also needed to establish just how the body parts came into the possession of the UK institutions in the first place.

The idea of a panel to investigate and adjudicate on ownership claims comes from the Human Remains Working Group.

Commissioned by UK ministers, the group will report formally on Wednesday.

Campaigners have long pressurised curators to hand over old bones so that they can be buried in their tribal homelands.

Rights issue

At issue are the materials - which range from locks of hair to full skeletons - that were taken from foreign countries, largely in the 19th and 20th Centuries, by scientists, explorers and enthusiastic collectors.

Researchers say this material has huge value to science even today - providing invaluable information about human origins and evolution, and the spread and development of disease.

But to indigenous groups, the collections are an affront to their customs and they claim many of the artefacts were effectively stolen by colonial explorers and hunters.

The groups say they should have every right - legal and moral - to repossess the material.

"The stolen remains need to be repatriated immediately," Rodney Dillon from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (Atsic), told BBC News Online.

"Then people need to come clean and say where the stolen remains came from... Just because they bought them doesn't mean to say they weren't stolen."

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