Countries demanding compensation for ‘awful’ legacy of Atlantic trade. Have hired lawyers who won pay-out for Kenyans tortured in the 1950s. Britain compensated slave owners £20m in 1834 – equal to £200bn today. Idea of reparations in the U.S. has often surfaced, but none has been paid.
Legal action: Britain, France and the Netherlands are being sued by 14 Caribbean countries for what could be billions of pounds in reparations for slavery, illustrated here in this 1861 drawing of a chain gang
Britain is being sued with France and the Netherlands by 14 Caribbean countries which are demanding what could be hundreds of billions of pounds in reparations for slavery.
Around 175 years after Britain freed its last slaves in the West Indies, an alliance of Caribbean nations is demanding to be repaid for the ‘awful’, lingering legacy of the Atlantic slave trade.
Caricom, a group of 12 former British colonies together with the former French colony Haiti and the Dutch-held Suriname, believes the European governments should pay – and the UK in particular.
It has hired the British law firm Leigh Day, which recently won compensation for hundreds of Kenyans tortured by the British colonial government during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s.
Caricom has not specified how much money they are seeking but senior officials have pointed out that Britain paid slave owners £20 million when it abolished slavery in 1834. That sum would be the equivalent of £200 billion today.
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