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Global campaigning for slavery reparations gathered pace this week with lobbying in Westminster and Brussels, days after the Jamaican government revealed it will ask King Charles to request legal advice on the issue.
On Tuesday, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Afrikan Reparations, a group of UK MPs and peers calling for an apology and reparative justice for the historical and ongoing impact of slavery and colonialism, hosted an independent delegation of Caribbean researchers and activists who are lobbying for reparations.
Diane Abbott MP, Dawn Butler MP, Paulette Hamilton MP, Juliet Campbell MP, Lady Margaret Curran and Lord Marvin Rees were among those who met with the delegation in Westminster, days after the Jamaican government announced plans to ask King Charles to request legal advice from the privy council on slavery reparations.
The Westminster event came the day after meetings in Brussels, where delegates, hosted by the Irish MEP Seán Kelly, met MEPs from the European parliament’s political groups to build support for reparations from former colonial powers.
The Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the APPG, said the Westminster meeting “made it very clear that reparations were not a fringe issue” dominated by British activists, but a matter of global significance, adding that Jamaica’s approach to King Charles was “key”.
She said: “I think it’s important that people are moving forward with legal remedies, because ultimately enslavement was ended with the law, the reparations to slave owners happened under the law, and so reparations to those affected must happen under legislation.”
The lobbying event was organised by the Repair Campaign, an independent group funded by the Irish telecoms billionaire Denis O’Brien, which commissioned the researchers to produce plans for what reparations might look like in different Caribbean countries.
According to the Repair Campaign, the plans, which are unofficial, received support from representatives of Portugal, Italy, Spain, Denmark, France and Ireland during a meeting with members of the European parliament in Brussels on Tuesday.
Acting outside the scope of the complex diplomatic negotiations of Commonwealth nations, Repair has been able to produce them with relative speed – in three years – hopeful that they will support the broader case from Caribbean and African politicians.
O’Brien, who founded the major Caribbean mobile phone network Digicel, said the Repair Campaign had spoken to, among others, governments, groups such as Heirs of Slavery, Indigenous communities, Jamaican Maroons and Rastafarians, and had aligned “15 fully costed economic and social development plans” drawn up by University of the West Indies academics, with a 10-point plan for reparatory justice by Caricom, the grouping of 20 countries in the Caribbean and the Americas.
“We’ve gone to government departments in the Caribbean and said, ‘what would you do if you had the budget to transform your country?’ And they’ve talked about land rights, justice, education, health service, culture and memorialisation, judicial reform and human rights and debt cancellation,” O’Brien said at the Westminster event, adding that the programmes were tailored to each island’s circumstances, with Haiti needing extra “for roads, water and electricity”.
He believes the European Union and the British Ggovernment should each fund 50% of the plan, “because they’re both equally culpable”.
At the same time, Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Movement (CRC), issued a statement on Wednesday in response to media reporting about “a Caribbean group visiting Britain and the European Union with a reparations agenda”. It clarified that “these persons who have arrived in Europe are neither members of the CRC nor formally affiliated”.
The statement added that the CRC would be launching a “European public relations campaign to share its vision of reparations with political stakeholders and the general public”.
Caricom is also combining efforts with the African Union to advocate for reparations.
The issue of reparations for transatlantic slavery has been heating up over the last year, dominating headlines in October when the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, resisted pressure from member states to include reparations on the agenda at the Commonwealth summit.
Pressure is intensifying from different sections of the global reparations movement on European countries involved in the kidnap, trafficking, forced labour, torture and sexual exploitation of millions of enslaved African peoples over a 300-year period.
Caribbean leaders have remained resolute in their pursuit of justice, with Barbados’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, stressing the importance of a face-to-face discussion on the issue and the prime minister of the Bahamas, Philip Davis, pointing to “legal avenues … if the negotiations fail”.
In June it emerged that Jamaica was seeking legal remedy, asking King Charles, who remains the island’s head of state, to use his authority to request legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based privy council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries, on whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain was under obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
Responding to questions about whether King Charles is obliged to honour Jamaica’s request, the deputy chair of the country’s National Reparations Council, Bert Samuels, said if King Charles, who is part of the monarchy that benefited from slavery, refuses to refer the issue or if the privy council does not come back giving “positive recognition to the three questions” there would be a global “avalanche of criticism” of Britain.
He added that the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020 anti-racism protests was evidence of “an across-the-board rejection for the celebration of the slave trade, no matter how long ago it was”.
Samuels added that Jamaica may take the matter to the international courts if it fails to get justice in Britain’s legal system.
