The precedents cited are real but they do not support the Caribbean reparations claim when examined carefully. Each existing reparations scheme shares characteristics that the Caribbean case lacks entirely.
The German reparations to Holocaust survivors were paid by the state that committed the crimes, to living victims and their immediate families, within a generation of the crimes occurring, with clearly identifiable perpetrators, clearly identifiable victims, and a clear causal chain between the specific crimes and the specific harm suffered. The German government that paid reparations was the legal successor to the government that operated the concentration camps.
The United States payments to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War were made to living victims of a specific government action, within the lifetimes of those victims, by the same government that interned them. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 explicitly acknowledged that the internment was wrong and paid $20,000 to each surviving internee. The people who received the cheques were the people who had been interned.
The British settlement with Kenyan torture victims in 2013 involved living victims of specific acts of torture committed by British colonial forces in the 1950s, within the lifetimes of those victims, with specific documented acts of violence and identifiable individuals who suffered them. The UK government accepted liability for specific tortious acts.
The Caribbean case has none of these features. The people who were enslaved are dead. Their oppressors are dead. The events occurred 200 to 400 years ago. There are no living victims. There are no specific documented acts for which specific individuals or their immediate descendants can claim compensation. The proposed recipients are governments, not individuals. The proposed payers are current taxpayers who had no connection to slavery.
The German, American, and British precedents actually illustrate precisely what makes a reparations scheme workable: living victims, identifiable perpetrators, specific documented wrongs, close temporal proximity, and payment to those who suffered rather than to governments. The Caribbean claim fails every one of these tests. Citing these precedents as support for Caribbean reparations is selective use of analogy that ignores the features that made those schemes legitimate.
