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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/sep/06/jamaica-slavery-reparations-petition-king-charles>
"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 an 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 15th and 19th centuries, more than 12.5 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 2009. 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."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
