The visit of King Charles III to the Caribbean for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Antigua has created the occasion for the celebration of the relations between Britain and the Caribbean and, in particular, the countries which he has visited. It has also created the opportunity to bring the influence of the Region, and the broader Commonwealth, to bear on the British Government, through King Charles, to apologise for slavery and to grant reparations to Caribbean and African countries which have suffered grievous harm from the kidnapping, transportation and enslavement of millions of Africans and decimation of Indigenous peoples.
The fight for reparations has taken on international dimensions. On March 25 this year, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an historic, non-binding, resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. The resolution urges UN member states to initiate dialogue regarding formal apologies, contributions to a reparatory justice and reparations fund targeting education, skill-building, and systematic inequalities, and the prompt return of looted, colonial era cultural artifacts to their countries of origin.
In August of this year the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued a complimentary legal guidance stating that countries are legally obliged under the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination to consider reparations for the legacy of slavery. The argument is that the systemic underdevelopment, marginalization, and racial inequalities experienced by people of African descent today are the direct, enduring results of a deliberate global economic system of human extraction and that justice requires active reparatory frameworks.
The modern era movement for reparations was launched in the US by James Forman in 1969 when he issued the Black Manifesto at the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, demanding $500 million from white churches and synagogues. Demands for reparations go back as far as 1783 to the lobbying of the US Congress for pensions in 1896 by The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, with hundreds of thousands of members across the American South. Eventually, a modest and inadequate form of reparations known as “affirmative action,” developed. But the Bakke case in the US Supreme Court dealt a blow to affirmative action rendering it barely effective.
The demand for reparations has now grown into a worldwide movement, sanctioned by the United Nations, in which Caricom plays a very important role and has a substantial voice. The Caricom Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice is a 52-page document issued in June 2026. It is defined “a document prepared principally for the governments and people of the Caribbean but conceptualised and designed to facilitate and guide the global African reparations movement. It outlines the development priorities for the Region as it demands reparations from the United Kingdom, Europe and all enslaving nations, for their role in over four hundred years of native genocide, chattel African enslavement and violent extractive colonialism.”
The ten points are as follows:
1. Full and formal official apologies on behalf of all Africans from former enslaving nations in Europe and beyond.
2. Reparations for Caribbean Indigenous Peoples through an Indigenous Peoples Development Programme aimed at supporting these communities, rectifying historical injustices and ensuring that they can thrive.
3. Descendants of African slaves have a right to repatriation and resettlement in Africa and demands reparations to honour and respect the human rights of a people forcibly stolen and removed from their homeland and enslaved.
4. Recognising culture as a cornerstone of regional identity, Caricom demands reparations and cultural restitution for the restoration and preservation of Indigenous, African-Caribbean cultural heritage and the establishment of sustainable cultural institutions.
5. Reparations to address the existing public health crisis manifested in the high prevalence of non-communicable diseases, inadequate health care infrastructure and the health impacts of climate change.
6. Reparations to repair the education system they inherited from colonialism. The aim is to eradicate illiteracy and foster a population that can engage with historical truths critically and constructively.
7. Reparations for the specific violations against Indigenous and African women to ensure that the multiple harms of colonialism, chattel enslavement, and systemic racism perpetrated by European enslavers against them are fully acknowledged and repaired.
8. All enslaving states to adhere to international human rights law which recognises the principle that victims of gross human rights violations have a right to reparations in relation to the massive psychological trauma in the collective memory and psyche of millions of citizens.
9. Caricom demands the right to complete sovereignty and development with a special focus on technology, innovation and entrepreneurship as an enforceable right.
10. Caricom demands monetary compensation from enslaving nations, monarchies, churches, institutions, corporations and families for loss of life, uncompensated labour, loss of liberty, personal injury, mental pain and anguish and gender-based violence for the victims of Indigenous genocide, the trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans. Caricom also demands reparations for the lingering related legacies of these crimes on the descendants of the victims, perpetrated through colonialism and cancellation of all Caricom-European bilateral debts accrued to repair the harms of the legacies of colonization and colonialism.
The struggle for reparations has made significant headway. Britain and other European countries are on the defensive. With the British Prime Minister ready to talk about an apology, now is the time for the pressure to intensify.
Discussion