Tribunal for Transatlantic Slave Trade: Africa & Caribbean Call for Action

African and Caribbean nations are uniting to demand justice and reparations for the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade perpetrated by western countries, Eric McLaren Phillips, chairperson of the Guyana Reparations Committee and Vice Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, told Global South Pole

Mr. Phillips elaborated on the idea of a Nuremberg-style reparations tribunal during the Ghana Reparations Summit last November, arguing that existing legal systems in former colonial countries make it difficult to seek justice for slavery.

"We found that most European countries have ring-fenced their legal systems. So for example, in the UK you can't bring any case for crimes and colonial crimes before a certain year. And as you look at Holland and Germany and France, all of these countries have ring-fenced themselves so that it leaves us very little options to pursue the crimes against humanity domestically," he stressed.

Commenting on why the tribunal is important, the expert explained that it is difficult to pursue it "otherwise," as even if countries apologize for slavery, legal barriers prevent lawsuits and reparations within their own courts. A separate tribunal, modeled after Nuremberg, could circumvent these restrictions and offer a path to justice.

“There has to be some international process because this was an international crime, and this international crime lasted over 400 years, and of course, continued with colonialism and neocolonialism,” he says.

The official lay emphasis on why it is important for African and Caribbean countries to support the idea because of the negative consequences of slavery and exploitation of resources of these regions in favor of Europe, which left the exploited countries struggling with poverty, underdevelopment, and vulnerabilities like climate change.

"We need Africa and the Caribbean to come together [...] because economic sustainability in Africa has been significantly hampered, and in the Caribbean it has been definitely hampered when you look at issues of climate change and other things that are threatening the Caribbean right now, and you look at the tremendous poverty and underdevelopment in most African countries and in the Caribbean, because part of the policy of slavery and colonialism was on the development of the countries with the extracted work from," he explains.

To listen to what our Mr. Phillips had to say, listen to the Global South Pole podcast brought to you by Sputnik Africa.

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