A landmark petition is to be handed to King Charles by Jamaica over slavery reparations, aiming to confront historical crimes that still disadvantage former British colonies, the Caribbean nation’s culture minister has said.
The petition will be lodged with Charles, Jamaica’s head of state, on Monday.
“We’re a resilient people. We were able to bounce back from [Hurricane] Melissa, for example,” said Olivia Grange, who arrived in London at the weekend with members of Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations.
“But we still have a lot of work to do, and you can imagine if we did not have those inherited problems, the legacy that came out of slavery, how much better we would have been able to do so,” she told the Guardian.
First announced in June last year, the petition asks the monarch 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.
It wants Charles to ask whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, if it constituted a crime against humanity, and whether Britain is under obligation to provide restitution to Jamaica for slavery and its enduring consequences.
Grange said that these questions and a privy council response were critical to progressing the country’s reparations claims.
Between the ۱۵th and ۱۹th centuries, more than ۱۲.۵ million Africans were kidnapped, forcibly transported to the Americas and sold into slavery.
Grange said that Jamaica had been the first Caribbean nation to create a national reparations mechanism, establishing it in ۲۰۰۹. She said the aim was to address the enduring impacts of slavery, that put countries such as Jamaica at a grave economic disadvantage and affected its ability to respond to modern-day challenges in the Caribbean, such as the climate crisis.
“We have inherited systems that continue to deprive our country and our people. The legacy in education, even in health, the way we eat, our diet because of what we were fed, our ancestors were fed,” she said.
Ralph Gonsalves, a former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines who was instrumental in setting up the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission, echoed Grange’s sentiments.
“The present is very much the past, because what we are dealing with is the legacies of underdevelopment which you can source, and we do source, to native genocide and enslavement of African bodies,” he said on Sunday.
“People must remember this: that European nations were enriched because of the enslavement of African bodies.” Gonsalves is an elder and adviser for the Repair Campaign, a social movement for reparatory justice.
He said Jamaica’s visit was a critical milestone among a number of upcoming events, including a Caribbean reparations conference in Barbados later this month, and planned advocacy at the upcoming UN general assembly in late September and the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Antigua in November, which King Charles is scheduled to attend.
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There are growing global calls for Britain and other former colonial powers to recognise hundreds of years of transatlantic slavery that treated African people as chattel as a crime, and to engage in a process of reparatory justice.
In March this year, ۱۲۳ nations voted for a landmark UN resolution that described chattel slavery as the gravest crime against humanity. In June, the Caribbean launched a manifesto outlining the “moral, ethical and legal case for reparations”. And last month, a UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination said countries were legally obliged to consider reparations for the transatlantic slave trade and take other measures to address the enduring legacy of racial discrimination.
The UK was one of several European countries that abstained from voting in the March UN resolution, and in October ۲۰۲۴, the former British prime minister Keir Starmer resisted pressure from member states to include reparations in the Commonwealth heads of government meeting agenda.
Grange said she hoped the visit would facilitate a unifying response to the complicated history.
On Sunday, the delegation will host a remembrance church service in Brixton, and later in the week they are due to meet UK members of parliament. Grange said there would also be a visit to the British Museum, to discuss repatriation of Jamaican artefacts.
She said: “We may have different history, different heritage, different skin colour, but it’s about humanity. It’s about, as a people, being able to live together, to work together, and to respect each other.
“And in our efforts to seek reparatory justice, we will use the opportunity to also promote and encourage what Jamaica is known for, One Love, because we have the song of the century through Bob Marley.”
