CARICOM’s Ten-Point Plan: The Caribbean Blueprint for Reparatory Justice

Quarterly Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update | Published: 3 July 2014 | Period covered: January–June 2014

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Key Developments at a Glance

• CARICOM unanimously adopts ten-point reparatory justice programme at March 2014 heads of government summit.
• Jamaica among fourteen CARICOM states to formally endorse the reparations framework at Antigua meeting.
• Immigration Bill 2014 passes through parliament; receives Royal Assent in May as the Immigration Act 2014.
• Right-to-rent and ‘deport first, appeal later’ provisions attract sustained opposition from community groups.
• CARICOM Reparations Commission publishes detailed position papers; diaspora advocacy builds in the UK.
• Portia Simpson Miller government aligns Jamaica formally with CARICOM reparations push.

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Two events from the first half of 2014 will define this period’s place in the history of Jamaica, the Caribbean diaspora, and the relationship between the Caribbean and Britain. The first, in the spring of 2014 in Antigua, was a moment of historic regional solidarity: fourteen Caribbean nations, assembled at the thirty-fifth CARICOM inter-sessional meeting, voted unanimously to adopt a ten-point programme for reparatory justice and to commission the CARICOM Reparations Commission to pursue it. The second, in Westminster, was a piece of legislation: the Immigration Bill 2014, which passed through parliament and received Royal Assent in May, adding new layers of hostile environment enforcement to an architecture that is already causing harm to Caribbean-born British residents who have lived here for decades.

The CARICOM Reparations Summit: A Historic Commitment

The CARICOM inter-sessional meeting in Antigua and Barbuda in March 2014 was a landmark moment in the modern history of the Caribbean’s relationship with the legacies of slavery and colonialism. For the first time, the collective body of Caribbean Community states — Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago — voted unanimously to formally adopt a reparatory justice programme and to mandate the CARICOM Reparations Commission to pursue it with the governments of Europe.

The ten-point programme, developed over more than a year of consultation by the commission under the leadership of Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, represents the most comprehensive and formally organised statement of the Caribbean’s reparations demands in the modern era. Its ten points cover: a full formal apology; repatriation (addressing the question of Caribbean people displaced during and after the colonial era); an indigenous peoples’ development programme; a cultural institutions programme; a public health crisis programme; an illiteracy eradication programme; an African knowledge programme; a psychological rehabilitation programme; a technology transfer programme; and a debt cancellation programme.

The commission has been explicit that the programme is not a claim for individual cash payments but a framework for collective reparatory actions that would build the structural capacity of Caribbean societies that colonialism and slavery systematically undermined. The scale of the harm documented by the commission — the demographic destruction of the middle passage, the brutal conditions of plantation slavery, the systematic extraction of Caribbean resources and labour for the enrichment of European economies, and the persistent structural inequality that has followed — is described in terms that make the moral case for reparations with power and precision.

Jamaica’s Role: Portia’s Commitment

Jamaica’s Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller was among the heads of government who voted to adopt the ten-point programme at Antigua. Jamaica’s commitment to the reparatory justice cause is both personal — Simpson Miller has spoken with evident passion about the legacy of slavery and its continuing consequences for Jamaican society — and political: the reparations issue commands broad support across Jamaica’s political spectrum and resonates deeply with the Jamaican community both on the island and in the diaspora.

For Jamaica, the reparations argument is grounded in the island’s particular history. Jamaica was the site of some of the most intensive plantation slavery in the Atlantic world, with a sugar economy that generated extraordinary wealth for British merchants, Crown revenue, and financial institutions, while destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. The abolition of slavery in 1833 resulted in compensation being paid by the British government not to the enslaved but to the slave owners — including the Crown itself in its capacity as an enslaver — while the formerly enslaved received nothing and were bound for a further four years of unpaid “apprenticeship.” The consequences of that settlement have shaped Jamaica’s social and economic structure ever since.

In the United Kingdom, the Jamaican and Caribbean diaspora has been an active supporter of the reparations cause. Community organisations, academics, lawyers, and cultural figures have been engaging with the CARICOM commission and developing UK-based advocacy to build public support for reparatory justice in the country whose government is the primary target of the claim. The diaspora’s unique position — living in Britain, understanding its political culture, with access to its media and parliamentary processes — makes it a potentially crucial partner in the commission’s work.

The Immigration Bill: Hostile Environment Deepens

While the Caribbean was celebrating a historic moment of collective solidarity on reparatory justice, Westminster was completing the passage of legislation that will deepen the hostile environment for Caribbean-born British residents. The Immigration Bill 2014, which received Royal Assent on 14 May 2014, contains provisions that community groups have been fighting throughout its parliamentary passage.

The right-to-rent provisions, which will require landlords to verify the immigration status of tenants, have attracted particular concern from Caribbean community organisations. The scheme is to be piloted in the West Midlands and, if evaluated positively, extended nationally. Critics argue that it will inevitably produce discriminatory outcomes: landlords, uncertain about how to verify the complex immigration status of individuals who arrived as Commonwealth citizens before 1973, will take the path of least resistance and refuse to rent to anyone whose status is not immediately obvious from a current passport.

The “deport first, appeal later” provisions have attracted equally fierce opposition. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, Amnesty International, and a coalition of legal organisations argued during the bill’s passage that removing the right of appeal from within the United Kingdom for most categories of deportee fundamentally undermines access to justice. For individuals whose connection to Jamaica is tenuous — who may have arrived as infants, attended British schools, and have family and community ties entirely in the United Kingdom — the requirement to leave and appeal from abroad is practically equivalent to having no right of appeal at all.

Parliamentary Debate and Caribbean Community Voices

The Immigration Bill’s passage through parliament generated significant debate, including from Caribbean-heritage MPs who raised the specific impact of the legislation on their communities. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham and son of Guyanese immigrants, spoke in the Commons about the right-to-rent provisions and their discriminatory potential. Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, raised concerns about the deportation provisions. Their arguments, while heard, did not prevail against a government majority determined to legislate the hostile environment into statute.

Outside parliament, Caribbean community organisations, legal charities, and human rights groups have been documenting the existing impact of hostile environment policies on long-settled residents and building the evidential base for future advocacy. The work being done now, by organisations including the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the Runnymede Trust, and local community legal services, is laying the groundwork for a challenge to these policies that is still taking shape. The cases are accumulating. The evidence is growing. The political moment when that evidence will demand a response has not yet come. But it is coming.

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Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; BBC News; Reuters; The Guardian; CARICOM Reparations Commission; UK Parliament Hansard; Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants; Runnymede Trust; Amnesty International UK; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK).

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