CARICOM reparation call boosted

In the heat of a US presidential election campaign in which racial rhetoric is growing louder, the working group warned that the US has not yet confronted its legacy of racial terrorism and that Americans of African descent were facing a human rights crisis.

In a press statement in Geneva last week, the working group said, this “human rights crisis” in the US “has largely been fuelled by impunity for police officers who have killed a series of black men - many of them unarmed - across the country in recent months.” The killings and the trauma they create, were reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynchings, the group said, in a report they presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Addressing the deeper causes of America’s racial tensions, the report said, the experts voiced concern over the unresolved legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality.

There has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent, the report said.

The working group visited the several states in the US in January before producing their final report.

The report is expected to be welcomed by CARICOM, which is also pursuing reparations from Britain and other European Union member-states that benefitted from slavery in the Caribbean.