They Compensated the Enslavers. The Enslaved Are Still Waiting.
The vote has been cast. Now the real question: what does justice actually look like in practice?
One hundred and twenty-three countries said yes to reparations. The UN resolution has passed. The applause has faded. Now comes the harder question, the one that makes Western governments uncomfortable and diaspora communities fire up their WhatsApp groups at midnight: what does reparatory justice actually look like? Who pays? How much? To whom? And what happens in Jamaica?
Let’s get into it, because reparations are not, as critics lazily suggest, simply a cheque in the post. The conversation has moved far beyond that, and CARICOM has spent over a decade building the most detailed reparatory justice framework in the world.
The CARICOM Ten-Point Plan: A Blueprint Already Exists
In 2014, the Caribbean Community’s Reparations Commission, chaired by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, published the CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice. This is not a wish list. It is a legal and moral framework developed over years of scholarship, legal research, and community consultation. It remains the central document guiding the Caribbean’s engagement with European nations on reparations.
The ten points are:
- A full formal apology
- Repatriation for those who wish to return to Africa
- An indigenous peoples development programme
- Cultural institutions to restore African history and culture
- Public health support (the slave trade decimated the mental and physical health of communities whose descendants still experience higher rates of illness and trauma)
- Illiteracy eradication (Caribbean governments spend over 70% of public expenditure on health and education trying to undo colonial legacies)
- An African knowledge programme restoring African epistemology and history to education
- Psychological rehabilitation to address the mass psychological trauma of slavery and its aftermath
- Technology transfer to address the technological underdevelopment imposed by colonialism
- Debt cancellation, because much of the debt held by Caribbean nations properly belongs to the imperial governments that created the conditions for that debt.
Notice what is not on that list: a single lump-sum cash payment to individuals.
The CARICOM framework has always been about structural transformation. Not handouts, but healing. Not charity, but justice.
“This debt cycle properly belongs to the imperial governments who have made no sustained attempt to deal with debilitating colonial legacies.” — CARICOM Ten-Point Plan
Jamaica: At the Sharp End of the Argument
Jamaica’s claim is particularly powerful and particularly personal. The island was one of the most profitable slave colonies in the history of the British Empire. At the height of the plantation era, Jamaica produced more wealth for Britain than all of its North American colonies combined. Enslaved Africans, over 600,000 of them, were worked to death in its sugar fields. The mortality rate was so high that the enslaved population had to be constantly replenished by new trafficking from West Africa.
When emancipation came in 1834, the British government paid £20 million in compensation, equivalent to billions in today’s money, to the slaveholders. Not a penny went to the enslaved. Jamaica’s Black population was told to be grateful for their freedom and to keep working the same fields. The structural disadvantage built into that moment has compounded over nearly 200 years.
Today, Jamaica carries significant national debt, underfunded health and education systems, and persistent poverty rates concentrated in Black Jamaican communities whose ancestors received nothing at emancipation while their enslavers were paid handsomely for losing their human property. The link between that history and today’s inequality is not metaphorical. It is mathematical.
Jamaica’s Legal Strategy
Jamaica has not waited for the UN vote to act. In 2025, in a remarkable move backed by CARICOM, Jamaica’s government announced it would pursue a legal route through the Privy Council, Britain’s highest court which retains jurisdiction over Jamaica, asking it to rule on whether slavery and the forced trafficking of Africans to Jamaica was illegal and constituted a crime against humanity. Culture Minister Olivia Grange, who championed the initiative in parliament, argued that Britain is “under an obligation to provide a remedy to Jamaica,” not just for slavery itself but for its “enduring consequences.”
This is a brilliant strategic move. It sidesteps the political reluctance of Westminster by going through the courts. It forces a legal reckoning rather than waiting for political goodwill. And if the Privy Council rules in Jamaica’s favour, the implications for the entire Caribbean would be transformative.
What Reparations Could Actually Deliver
Scholars and economists who have studied reparations models suggest several practical mechanisms. Debt cancellation is the most immediately impactful: writing off the sovereign debt of Caribbean nations would free billions of dollars currently servicing loans, allowing governments to invest in health, education and infrastructure. Some estimates put the total public debt across CARICOM nations at over $50 billion, much of it owed to institutions in former colonial powers.
A reparations fund, analogous to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt post-war Europe, could channel resources into specific development priorities identified by Caribbean and African governments themselves. This is the model proposed for the African Union’s Decade of Reparations, running from 2026 to 2036: a ten-year period to establish global justice funds and begin the process of debt cancellation and structural investment.
Cultural repatriation is another concrete demand. Tens of thousands of African and Caribbean artefacts currently sit in European museums. The British Museum alone holds an estimated 900 objects from the Caribbean. The UN resolution specifically calls for their “prompt and unhindered restitution.” This is not just about objects. It is about restoring the stolen cultural patrimony of communities whose identity was systematically destroyed by slavery and colonialism.
There are also calls for a formal international apology fund, not just words but a formal acknowledgment accompanied by concrete commitments, modelled on Germany’s post-Holocaust reparations programme which has paid out over 80 billion euros to Holocaust survivors and their descendants since 1952.
The Diaspora’s Role
For Jamaicans in London, New York, Toronto, and across the world, the UN vote is not an abstract political moment. It is personal. Many carry family stories of relatives who lived through colonialism, who came to Britain in the Windrush generation and were later threatened with deportation. Who built the National Health Service, the London Underground, the post-war economy, and were told their contributions didn’t count. Who sent remittances home for decades. Who built communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
The diaspora is now being called to mobilise. CARICOM’s reparations movement needs diaspora voices in the countries where abstaining and opposing governments live. In the UK, Jamaican and Caribbean community organisations have long pushed for reparations conversations at a domestic level. The UN vote gives them a new platform, new momentum, and a new number to point to: 123.
In the United States, where the reparations debate has been raging domestically for years, from congressional bills to municipal programmes in cities like Evanston, Illinois, the UN vote adds international legitimacy to a cause that has often been dismissed as radical fringe politics. It is not fringe politics. It is the position of the majority of the world.
What Comes Next
The resolution passed. The Decade of Reparations has begun. The African Union and CARICOM are now tasked with collaborating on a concrete reparatory justice framework with UN bodies. Jamaica’s Privy Council case is moving forward. And 123 countries are on record.
The road ahead is not simple. The resolution is non-binding. The countries with the deepest obligations, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United States, either voted no, abstained, or said supportive words with no commitments attached. The gap between the vote and actual implementation is vast, and closing it will require years more of pressure, advocacy, legal challenge, and political organising.
But something has shifted. The global conversation about reparations has moved from “if” to “how.” The moral case is won. The political consensus is building. And for the descendants of those 12.5 million Africans who were stolen from their homes, put in shackles and shipped across an ocean, the people whose labour built the modern world and whose descendants were given nothing for it, the work is not finished.
It has just entered a new phase.
“Justice does not expire with time.” — Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s Foreign Minister
