Battle for slavery reparations pledge at EU summit

Latin American and Caribbean countries pushed the European Union to commit to reparations for slavery and achieved a declaration of profound “regret” over the transatlantic slave trade, as dozens of national leaders met in Brussels in the first such inter-regional summit in eight years.

The calls were led by prime minister of the small Caribbean island of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, who currently serves as president of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and opened the summit by saying he wanted “reparatory justice for native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies”.

He told The Irish Times that reparations should take the form of debt relief and investment in health, education, housing infrastructure and cultural memorials in order to repair “the historical legacies of underdevelopment which you can link directly in the case of my country to native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies”.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was home to an indigenous population before it was successively colonised by France and Britain and became the site of plantations worked by enslaved Africans whose descendants live there today.

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Mr Gonsalves cited the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, France and Britain as the principal countries targeted in the reparations call as “the main colonial powers and those who were involved in slavery”.

These efforts resulted in a paragraph about slavery being included in the declaration jointly agreed by the EU and Celac at the summit.

“We acknowledge and profoundly regret the untold suffering inflicted on millions of men, women and children as a result of the transatlantic slave trade,” the paragraph reads.

Referring back to similar language set down in a United Nations declaration reached in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, it acknowledges that “slavery and the slave trade, including the transatlantic slave trade, were appalling tragedies in the history of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of their magnitude, organised nature and especially their negation of the essence of the victims”.

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“Slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity,” it concludes.

The declaration did not commit to reparations, however, instead noting that Celac had “referred to” a ten-point Plan for Reparatory Justice previously drawn up by the intergovernmental Caribbean organisation Caricom.

Mr Gonsalves said he would have liked a stronger paragraph but that European countries were now “on notice” of the campaign for reparations.

“It’s an acknowledgment of the horrors of the slave trade and of slavery and there’s a platform on which we can build,” Mr Gonsalves said.

Reached after two days of negotiations, the 10-page declaration set out a range of ways in which the regions could increase trade and social ties and it was hailed as a success by the summit’s chief negotiators after a disagreement over language about the war in Ukraine threatened to derail the meeting.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he did not support the push for reparations to be included.

“It’s not the case that every European country had colonies and it’s not the case that every European country was involved in the slave trade – far from it,” Mr Varadkar said. “There are many European countries that could seek reparations because of historical wrongs done to them. And I don’t think that’s the right road to go down.”