By *Jomo Thomas
A high-powered delegation of Caribbean reparationists ramped up the push for reparations during a visit to London early this week (July 13 to 16). The delegation’s mission is to strengthen strategic partnerships to promote a programme of public education and civil society engagement on the reparations agenda.
The members of the Caribbean Reparations Commission (CRC) delegation are Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, chairman, CRC; Dorbrene O’Marde, chairman, Antigua and Barbuda Reparations Support Commission and Vice Chair, CRC; Eric Phillips, Chairman, Guyana Reparations Committee and Vice Chair, CRC; Professor Verene Shepherd, Vice Chair, CRC, and Vice Chair, UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and Ambassador David Comissiong, Barbados Ambassador to CARICOM.
In an important strategic development, Dr. Ron Daniels, convenor of the National African Reparations Commission (USA), will also join the delegation. Reparations advocates in the United States have credited the emergence, dynamism and advocacy of the Caribbean Reparations Commission with infusing new energy and purpose into the reparations drive in the United States.
Our African American brothers and sisters are not new to the reparations cause. In 1865, when the Civil War ended, it was ordered that the formerly enslaved would receive 40 acres and a mule. But President Andrew Johnson (1865 to 1869) reversed the order.
On March 24, 2002, 137 years after the abolition of slavery in the United States, reparations lawsuits were filed in federal courts against a series of major American companies, including FleetBoston Bank, New York Life, and Aetna Insurance. These companies were proven to have benefited from slavery. The case was dismissed for remoteness, meaning that it was brought too many years after the crimes of slavery had been committed.
The Commission’s visit takes place during a period of significant developments in international reparations efforts and as CARICOM Member States prepare for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda.
In March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the landmark Ghana-led resolution declaring the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and chattel enslavement as the “gravest crime against humanity”.
Following this important United Nations vote, Ghana hosted the High-Level Consultative Conference on Reparations in Accra in June 2026. Described as an “historic turning point for Africans and People of African descent”, the conference brought together governments, legal experts, civil society leaders, and international organisations to develop a unified framework for advancing reparatory justice worldwide.
In another significant development, the revised CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice was finalised and approved by the Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government. A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment, which positions reparations as a ‘global human rights imperative.’
CARICOM’s reparations manifesto, presented to British parliamentarians, demands that former colonial powers not only offer financial compensation but also cede their territories in the region.
During the visit to the United Kingdom, Dr. Hilary Beckles, the CRC chair, called on Britain to give up its overseas territories as part of slavery reparations. The Caribbean region remains the most colonised area in the world, 66 years after the United Nations passed the historic decolonisation resolution in 1960.
Dr. Beckles told the UK newspaper, The Telegraph: “We are still here, from being the first part of the world to be colonised. The world has been maybe 90 per cent decolonised. We cannot abide the fact that maybe 20 per cent of the population in the Caribbean are still living in colonies.”
Dr. Beckles, speaking for the CRC, said the decolonisation demand covers the British holdings of Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. The independence of these territories would end the situation in which residents of territories colonised by Europe live as “second-class inhabitants”. He pressed the point by arguing that other territories, including Saint Martin, Aruba, Curacao, Martinique and Guadeloupe, have a “legitimate claim to nationhood and freedom” which has been suppressed by colonisers.
Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon, anti-colonial giants from Martinique whose work on colonialism and colonial violence did so much to raise the consciousness of liberation fighters across the globe, will be very pleased with these demands.
In highlighting the renewed push for reparations from Caribbean and African nations, Dr. Beckles said his commission felt compelled to beef up what was initially launched in 2014 as a 10-point reparations plan into a full-fledged manifesto that includes issues of decolonisation, gender based violence and the effects of slavery on women, who were sexually exploited and denied the rights of family life, and climate justice.
Another demand is for the subsequent exploitative use of indentured labourers following abolition. The original plan, which successive UK governments have rebuffed, calls for measures ranging from a formal apology to debt cancellation.
The struggle for reparatory justice is more akin to a marathon rather than a sprint. This battle is not going to be easy. Still, it will be won once African people on the African continent and the African diaspora strengthen their commitment, guard their unity and build up their organisation. A disunited and unorganised people have never won anything.
Already, there’s an increased, aggressive pushback from the UK and the other former slave-trading powers. Britain has long dismissed the call for compensation, saying it prefers to look forward and not backwards, noting that slavery was legal. It has refused to issue a formal apology.
Conservative forces in the UK are becoming even more strident in their opposition to any form of reparations payment. Some have even argued that the demand for reparations by formerly enslaved peoples perpetuates a historical scam. For example, the Church of England, recognising that it benefited handsomely from the profits of slavery, had set aside 100 million pounds to address the legacies of slavery. A protracted, concerted effort is underway to compel the church to renege on its pledge.
Others say that British foreign development aid since the independence of former colonies has more than compensated for the years of colonial domination. Barbados has pushed back against this argument with its own quantification plan, which shows that if the free labour extracted over the years of chattel slavery, using the wages of the lowest-paid agricultural labourer in the UK during the same period, Barbados would be owed about 9 trillion pounds.
There are also conservative efforts to apply maximum pressure on any formerly colonised country demanding reparations. The recommendation is for the UK government to deny visa access to nationals of those countries.
Responding to some of the anti-compensation arguments, CARICOM leaders, through the Caribbean Reparations Commission, have long insisted that the reparations movement is not about extracting “billions” from European powers, but working in partnership to develop the Caribbean, a region left with a burgeoning debt burden and numerous developmental deficiencies.
Consequently, the new aggressive advocacy and diplomatic push by CARICOM’s delegation is timely and critically important. It is worthwhile noting that Britain’s legal argument about the legality of slavery is false. Chattel slavery was never legal in Britain, as the 1773 Sommerset case proved. The argument that slavery was long ago and that the descendants of the formerly enslaved must pull themselves up and move on is also debunked with the disclosure by the British government that the 1833 loan of 20 million pounds used to pay enslavers after the emancipation in 1834 was only paid off in 2015.
The Caribbean, Africa and much of the Global South remain crime scenes as they struggle with the legacies of genocide, slavery and colonisation. Injury invites reward. Reparations now.
*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
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