The CARICOM ten-point plan does not define who qualifies as a beneficiary of reparatory justice. This omission has significant practical and moral implications that the campaign has never addressed.
Are all citizens of CARICOM member states beneficiaries? If so, citizens with no African ancestry, including those of Indian, Chinese, or European heritage, would receive reparations for slavery from which their ancestors did not suffer. Caribbean nations include significant populations of Indo-Caribbean descent, descendants of indentured workers brought from India after emancipation, whose ancestors were themselves exploited by British colonial labour policy. Are they entitled to share in payments for African slavery?
Are members of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and North America beneficiaries? They outnumber the Caribbean-resident population of several CARICOM member states. If they are beneficiaries, the payment mechanism becomes even more complex, as it would need to reach people distributed across multiple countries. If they are not, then the argument that CARICOM governments represent all descendants of enslaved people globally is undermined.
Are only people of African descent included? If so, then Caribbean nations would need to identify and classify their citizens by racial ancestry, which raises its own legal and ethical problems. The absence of any eligibility definition means that any payment to CARICOM governments could be distributed in any way those governments choose, with no assurance that it reaches the people the campaign claims to represent.
