Jamaicans lead Caribbean calls for Britain to pay slavery reparations

Professor Verene Shepherd, the chairman of Jamaica’s reparations committee, said British colonisers had “disfigured the Caribbean,” and that their descendants must now pay to repair the damage.

“If you commit a crime against humanity, you are bound to make amends,” Prof Shepherd told The Telegraph. “The planters were given compensation, but not one cent went to the freed Jamaicans”.

From the mid-18th century, British merchants shipped more than three million people from west Africa to the Americas, taking the lead in an Atlantic slave trade pioneered by the Dutch and Portuguese.

About £4 trillion was extracted from the region in unpaid labour alone, according to researchers at the University of Birmingham, and the vast profits went to financing the construction of modern Britain

“There is no statute of limitations on a crime against humanity,” Lord Gifford, who defended members of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, told The Telegraph. “The claim is soundly based in law.”

They even claim the trade was “genocidal,” and that while more than a million people were imported from Africa to Jamaica, at the time of emancipation the enslaved population was just over 300,000.

[link to www.telegraph.co.uk]