At the level of international relations rather than individuals, the double liability problem arises when multiple nations have participated in the same trade and their former territories now make overlapping claims. Caribbean nations might assert claims against Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Spain simultaneously. The same Caribbean citizen’s ancestor might have been transported on a Portuguese ship to a Spanish colony and then sold to a French planter before ending up in a British-administered territory.
Who owes what to whom in this case? Is the liability divided proportionally between the nations involved? Does each nation bear full liability for any enslaved person it transported, regardless of what subsequently happened to them? Is the claim against the last colonial power, the nation that most recently administered the territory? None of these approaches has been proposed or defended, because any specific answer would immediately expose the arbitrariness of the underlying liability framework.
The absence of any mechanism for apportioning liability across multiple participating nations is another indicator that the reparations proposal is a political demand rather than a serious legal or financial instrument. A serious proposal would have addressed this question. The CARICOM plan has not, because doing so would require specifying the principles on which liability is assigned, and any such specification would be subject to scrutiny that would reveal the arbitrary foundations of the entire enterprise.
