MASSACHUSETTS, United States, Friday February 25, 2016 – As he continues to make a push for reparations for Caribbean nations, Chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Sir Hilary Beckles is insisting that as uncomfortable as it may be for some, it’s time to face the past head on.
He was delivering a keynote address at the Harvard Law School on reparatory justice earlier this week when he insisted that the calls for reparations for the slave trade were not about retribution and anger, but about atonement and “building bridges across lines of moral justice”.
Sir Hilary, who is also Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI), called on Western leaders to atone for their countries’ wrongdoing by investing in housing, education, health care, social justice, and infrastructure development in the Caribbean.
“There’s no point in burying the legacy and memories…Let us bring everything to the surface and find a way forward through all of this,” he urged, adding that the “West will be on trial” until it made amends for the role its former colonies played in facilitating slavery.
“Those who argue against reparatory justice, when you examine the assumptions of those arguments, whether legal, philosophical, social, moral . . . they converge around a simple point: that the African peoples of the Americas might have a moral and legal right to justice, but they are not deserving of reparatory justice, unless they are facing human extinction.”
Sir Hilary also called on United States President Barack Obama to use his global influence to push the world towards increased reparative justice.
CARICOM leaders, in 2013, appointed the Reparations Commission to establish a case for reparations and Sir Hilary made reference to the 10-point plan he has developed, alongside a Commission of Inquiry, to best formulate a strategy for reparative justice to move the society forward.
