Caribbean & Central America - August 2026

The demands for reparations for slavery and related injustices have been highlighted in recent months. Although there are no signs that European countries are willing to give satisfaction to those calling for reparatory justice, the pressure for some form of compensation seems certain to grow.

On 25 March, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring that the trafficking of African slaves to the Americas was “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”. The vote was carried by 123-3, with 52 abstentions. The three countries voting against the resolution were the US, Israel, and Argentina. The UK and the 27 members of the European Union were among those that abstained. The US explained its position by saying it “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred”. It also said that it strongly objected to trying to rank crimes against humanity by labelling this as the gravest. France also objected to the attempt to establish “a hierarchy among crimes against humanity”. From the other side of the divide, Ereika Bennet, founder of the Diaspora African Forum, made the probably accurate assessment that “the vote will energise our collective resolve to continue the fight”.

Whether energised or not by the UN vote, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) kept the subject on the international agenda with the publication in June of its revised ‘Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice’, subtitled ‘A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment’. And this, in turn, was followed by a four-day visit to the UK, from 13-16 July, by members of the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC). During the visit, the Barbadian historian Hilary Beckles, chair of the commission, said the movement was entering the “stage of negotiations” after “an avalanche of apologies” from various institutions and the UN’s March vote.

The 400^th anniversary of the transport of the first African slaves to a British Caribbean colony (around 60 West Africans were landed on St Kitts in August 1626 to work on a newly established tobacco plantation) has provided further stimulus to the debate.

Headlines were also created by a social media post on 3 July by the UK’s former home secretary, Suella Braverman (2022-2023), who served in the previous Conservative government, saying that “if the government is seriously thinking about this [paying reparations] then former colonies should pay the British back for the considerable investment, effort and contribution that this country made which laid the foundations of many flourishing democracies today”.

Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has been at the forefront of the push for reparations, described the comments as “asinine”. Veteran Antiguan diplomat Ronald Sanders called the comments “historically illiterate” and “morally offensive”. He wrote: “For three hundred years Britain organised Caribbean economies around one crop – sugar – and later bananas, for the benefit of British conglomerates… In all that time, Britain did not bring development to the Caribbean; it brought wealth extraction.” Sanders added: “Caribbean efforts after independence to diversify their economies have been hobbled by missing infrastructure and poor transportation links… the colonial model routed everything through Britain… High levels of debt across the region are not accidents of geography but products of a historical pattern of exploitation. To rebrand this record as ‘investment’ is to confuse the plantation ledger with a development plan.”

The declared purpose of Caricom’s revised Ten Point Plan for Reparations is to “demand reparations from the United Kingdom (UK), Europe and all enslaving nations”. Its focus is on “native genocide of the Indigenous Peoples, chattel enslavement of Africans and the deceptive indentureship of Asians as three acts of the same play – criminal, extractive colonisation”, along with “the continuing harms and suffering that remain as legacies of those actions”.

The call for reparations has a long history, with St Lucian economist Arthur Lewis seen as the father of the modern Caribbean reparations movement for his work in the 1930s. He argued that over two hundred years of unpaid labour, which Britain extracted from millions of enslaved people in the Caribbean, was “a debt that must be repaid – and which the British have yet to repay.”

In much the same vein, Trinidadian diplomat Ellis Clarke, who later became president of the islands from 1976-1987, argued at the UN in 1964 that “an administering power… is not entitled to extract for centuries all that can be got out of a colony and when that has been done to relieve itself of its obligations; justice requires that reparation be made to the country that has suffered the ravages of colonialism”. In 1957, as the ill-fated West Indian Federation was being established, Caribbean leaders sought £200m (worth around US$5.7bn today) for economic development projects to be paid over 10 years, but the UK rejected the request.

Caricom’s own efforts to secure reparations date back to the 2013 creation of the CRC, further bolstered by the establishment in 2017 by the University of the West Indies (UWI) of a Centre for Reparation Research – the “overarching mandate” of which “is to document and discourse the moral, ethical and legal case for reparations”. A central argument of the CRC is that the negative legacies of slavery have extended to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America who “continue today to face racialised, institutional discrimination”. It also argues that “crimes against humanity” are “not subject to a statute of limitations within modernity”, and indeed this principal was codified by the UN in 1968.

One of the reparations movement’s main arguments is that the principle of reparations was accepted on the abolition of slavery, but for the slave owners not the enslaved. As the CRC puts it in its revised Ten Point Plan: “The British have listened with one ear and have proceeded to ignore or sideline what they have heard. European imperial nations, most notably the British, French, and Dutch have remained resolute in their resistance; no reparatory justice for their crimes against humanity”.

Caricom’s 10 demands are:

1.A full and formal apology.

2.An Indigenous Peoples development programme.

3.Repatriation and resettlement.

4.Restitution of cultural heritage and cultural reconnection.

5.Remedying the public health crisis.

6.Capacity-building and development through education and training.

7.Compensation for gender-based violence and assault on family.

8.Psychological rehabilitation.

9.The right to sovereignty and development.

10.Debt cancellation, monetary compensation and decolonisation.

In its conclusion, the CRC’s revised Ten-Point Plan points to “an enduring legacy of psychological trauma, financial dependency and socioeconomic disparities”. It calls for “financial redress” and for Europe “to confront its past, to accept responsibility and commit to reconciliation and repair of the harms inflicted on the victims and their descendants, which now challenge the sustainable development of the region”.