Caribbean Reparations Calls As Decolonising Accountability Tools for Inclusive Social Justice Frameworks

Caribbean reparations calls are a response to the lasting devastating legacies of colonialism and transatlantic slave trade, and the resultant global inequities that affect particularly the Global South, and thus, profound demands for accountability. However, they hardly find a footing in international human rights frameworks, debilitating various social justice demands.

This paper builds on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to critique international human rights-based justice frameworks and expose engrained structures of subordination and exclusion these frameworks have legitimated and reproduced. This paper is concerned with unearthing the epistemological injustices supported through international (human rights) law. In the TWAIL tradition, the paper asserts the Global South as a site for knowledge production and practice of human rights with specific understandings of and calls for justice that so far have not been reflected in and addressed by internatioanl human rights mechanisms for accountability and protection. Arguing that through calls for reparations, the Caribbean “speaks from a subaltern epistemic location” (Gathii 2020) that challenges the “universal” quality of Western worldviews reflected in international legal knowledge, this paper urges for a re-examination of the established perimeters of human rights-based justice, including standards, structures, mechanisms and methods.

Thus, the paper argues that reparations are decolonising calls demanding a critical re-imagining of the international (human rights) justice frameworks as systems that reflect and are inclusive of alternate standpoints on justice. It puts forward a theorisation of justice and reparations, in which both backward looking (reparation) and forward looking (compensation) responsibilities are taken by former coloniser States and the international community as duty bearers to respond to Caribbean reparations. The paper thus proposes and discusses in detail the necessary multifaceted effort, involving undertaking institutional, structural, legal and policy action by a wide range of actors operating at various international and national levels.