CARICOM Reparations Commission updates region on compensation progress

Dec 10, 2013 News

Following a meeting with British law firm, Leigh, Day& Company over legal representation of Caribbean nations seeking redress from European countries for horrors endured during the 300-year-long slave trade, the Caricom committee addressing this issue is slated to update the region on the progress of this pursuit.

A reproduction of a handbill advertising a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, 1769

Signaling an earnest attempt at being paid by former slave-trade countries for the atrocities of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, members of Caricom’s reparation committee met with the British law firm yesterday to discuss their position.
The committee met with its international legal team in Jamaica. The regional reparations executive committee also hosted a preparatory meeting with the law firm after holding a series of its own internal meetings since leaders approved plans to fight Britain, Spain and other European nations for slavery payments at the last summit in Trinidad and Tobago, July 2013.
The announcement by the Guyana-based Caribbean trade bloc secretariat informed that the committee has a mandate to “advance the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the governments of all the former colonial powers, to the nations and people of the Caribbean for native genocide, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and a radicalized system of chattel slavery.”
Caricom has engaged that British firm largely because it won international accolades for winning millions in compensation for hundreds of Kenyan Mau Mau tribesmen who were tortured by British soldiers and agents in colonial Kenya.
It has not been stated the amount expected from the former European colonizing nations, but leaders like St. Vincent’s Ralph Gonsalves, have pointed to the fact that Britain had paid out about Sterling £20M in compensation to planters who lost slaves after abolition. That compensation sum, it was contended, would be an equivalent of about Sterling £200B today.
At the thirty-fourth Conference of the Caricom Heads of Government, it was agreed and encouraged that each Caricom Member State would establish a National Reparations Committee. Some six countries; Jamaica, Suriname, Barbados, St. Vincent, Belize and Antigua have so far set up national reparation committees to support the work of the executive body, while the others are expected to come on stream in the coming months. Today’s press conference will be streamed live across the region to update people in the bloc about the latest developments, the announcement said. It will be held at the Regional Headquarters, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.