The CARICOM plan fails as a serious proposal on several grounds that its advocates do not adequately address.
The repatriation point is perhaps the most revealing. Point two of the plan calls for assistance for Caribbean people who wish to “return” to Africa. But the people who would be “repatriating” have never lived in Africa. Their ancestors were brought to the Caribbean involuntarily, but that does not make the Caribbean less their home or Africa more their home. The concept of repatriation assumes a connection to Africa that most Caribbean people have never experienced and may not feel. It treats Caribbean people as temporary residents of the Caribbean awaiting return to a continent most have never visited, which is itself a form of the identity erasure the plan claims to be addressing. No African country has indicated it is prepared to receive large numbers of Caribbean migrants, and the logistics of any such programme are entirely undefined.
The plan is also structured to be permanently open-ended. There is no defined endpoint, no agreed measure of when the reparatory obligations have been met, no mechanism for determining that sufficient has been paid or done, and no process for concluding the programme. This is not an accident: an open-ended programme of transfers from former colonial powers to Caribbean governments is not a settlement of historical claims but a permanent revenue stream. Serious reparatory programmes, like the German payments to Holocaust survivors, have defined recipients, defined amounts, defined timeframes, and a defined conclusion.
The accountability question is also unaddressed. The plan proposes that money be paid to Caribbean governments, not to individuals. But Caribbean governments have varied records of directing revenues towards their populations rather than towards political and elite interests. Jamaica, which would be a primary beneficiary, has struggled with corruption, debt mismanagement, and governance failures for decades. Paying reparations to Caribbean governments is not the same as delivering resources to the descendants of enslaved people. The route from payment to benefit is undefined.
Finally, the legal route to enforcing the plan does not exist. Leigh Day, the firm engaged to explore litigation, has not brought a case to court because there is no viable legal mechanism. No court anywhere in the world has accepted jurisdiction over a reparations claim of this kind. The legal arguments examined elsewhere on this site explain why. A serious proposal needs a serious legal foundation. The CARICOM plan does not have one.
