After more than a decade of operation, the CARICOM Reparations Commission has never produced an agreed methodology for calculating how much is owed. Different advocates produce wildly different figures, ranging from hundreds of billions to hundreds of trillions of pounds, using incompatible assumptions. No independent economic body, no international institution, and no court has endorsed any specific calculation.
This absence is not a minor implementation detail. For any financial claim to be actionable, you need to know the amount. A claim for “some money, the exact amount to be determined later” is not a legal claim. It is a political demand. The reparations campaign has been making this political demand for decades without ever specifying what it would actually cost, which tells you something important about what the campaign is and is not.
The reason no methodology has been agreed is that any specific methodology would immediately be subjected to scrutiny that would expose its arbitrary foundations. Every calculation requires assumptions about what the unpaid labour was worth, at what wage rate, over what period, converted to present-day values at what discount rate. Every one of these assumptions is contested, and different assumptions produce results that differ by orders of magnitude. The campaign is better served by citing enormous numbers without specifying how they were calculated than by producing a specific figure that could be examined and challenged.
