Reparations: An opportunity for transformative justice
By: Meghna Abraham
Radical wealth redistribution is necessary to truly address and redress injustice, and such a redistribution must occur within a framework of reparations. Audrey Gaughran, SOMO’s Executive Director, argued this in the opening piece of the ‘Reclaim the Wealth’ series. As a follow-up, this article unpacks the critical elements of reparations and contends that the reparations framework offers an opportunity not just to repair the harms of the past but to transform unjust systems to improve our collective future.
What are reparations?
Calls for reparations are not new. The concept has existed for centuries. Historically, reparations were claimed by states, especially following wars, when the victor sought reparations for the damage that had been caused. The right of an individual to a reparation gained attention in the aftermath of World War II, when the United Nations developed an international legal framework for the protection of human rights. This framework recognised that people whose human rights are violated have a right to an effective remedy and reparation. At its core, reparation requires that the harm caused to victims by the violations be stopped and repaired.
While reparation is an issue in all situations where human rights are violated, it becomes more complex in situations involving harms to large groups of people, especially when these harms have occurred over long periods of time. At the transnational level, some of the current debates focus on the lack of reparations for the ongoing legacies of chattel slavery and colonialism, as well as for the harms arising from the climate crisis.
There is a concerted attempt in Europe and North America to try and portray reparations for chattel slavery and colonialism as backwards-looking. These efforts deliberately ignore the fact that slavery and colonialism were not just distinct wrongful acts or events but were systems which implicated “entire legal, economic, social and political structures that enabled slavery and colonialism, and which continue to sustain racial discrimination and inequality today”.
The lack of reparation by governments to formerly enslaved people at the time of abolition of slavery or to them or their descendants since then has resulted in structural and persistent racial economic inequalities in countries such as the US. This lack of reparation manifested not just in the failure to provide any restitution and compensation but also in governments’ failure to repudiate racist ideologies that were used to justify chattel slavery and colonisation. To the contrary, as the African Futures Lab and I have pointed out elsewhere, governments of countries, such as the US, used Jim Crow and other laws to keep Black people in the most poorly paid and undervalued occupations. These patterns of discrimination and perpetuation of economic exploitation were maintained well into the 20th century by excluding people of colour explicitly or implicitly from labour laws and New Deal programs and policies. This systemic racism also manifested in the health system because Black workers did not have access to health insurance, and in education and housing through racial segregation or practices such as redlining. It has resulted in Black people and other people of colour disproportionately bearing the impacts of climate change, natural disasters, pollution, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The continuing absence of reparations, therefore, perpetuates systemic racism and persistent economic and social inequalities. These structural inequalities cannot be wished away. They will continue to grow in the absence of reparatory measures.
Debates around reparations in richer parts of the world also largely take a deliberately narrow view of the principle and reduce it to financial compensation. Opponents of reparation for any of these injustices, including the climate crisis, then argue that the money does not exist for such compensation to be paid to victims. This argument does not stack up. Reparation is more than financial compensation. It involves other elements that can be as important, if not more so.
Forms of reparation
Reparation can take many forms, depending on the nature of the harm suffered. The core elements include:
Restitution entails measures to restore the victim to their original situation, such as through the return of land or assets that were taken away. This is the preferred form of reparation, and other measures such as compensation normally arise when restitution is impractical or insufficient. An example is South Africa’s land reform program, which included restitution of land that was confiscated from black people under apartheid.
Compensation is the best-known element of reparations and involves payment for any economically assessable damage. For example, the US government paid US$1.6 billion to over 80,000 people of Japanese descent whom it rounded up and incarcerated in concentration camps in the US during World War II.
Satisfaction involves the entity which caused the harm acknowledging it and accepting responsibility. This can take the form of a public apology, but should be accompanied by a full disclosure of the facts and an accurate record of the violations. Mr Patricio Aylwin, the former President of Chile, apologised publicly in 1991, in a televised ceremony broadcast across the country, for the human rights violations committed by the state under General Pinochet’s rule. He did so while presenting the report of the Rettig Commission, which documented these violations and made recommendations for reparations and to prevent future violations.
Rehabilitation includes providing medical and psychological care for survivors of torture or other abuses, or restoration of land that has been polluted. The Trust Fund for Victims, a body set up under the Rome Statute to support victims of international crimes, helped over 100,00 victims of conflict, including survivors of sexual violence and former child soldiers, from Northern Uganda and DRC to access physical and psychological rehabilitation.
Guarantees of non-repetition are designed to ensure that similar violations do not occur in the future. They can include changes in laws or policies or restructuring of institutions. For example, in a case involving deaths and injuries to workers, mostly Black women and children, in a fireworks factory in Brazil, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights focused not just on compensation but also on structural remedies to guarantee non-repetition. These included strengthening regulation and inspection systems, as well as programs to address the economic vulnerability of the population.
The participation of victims in the design and implementation of reparations is also a critical component of the effectiveness of any reparations program.
Addressing structural causes to break cycles of abuse
Guarantees of non-repetition, the last form of reparation referred to above, are closely related to the requirement that the harm stops. Indeed, no reparatory measures can be meaningful if the harm they are intended to repair continues.
Where harms are caused by structural discrimination or other systems generating inequalities, reparations must address the underlying structures and systems that are creating those harms. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has recognised the need for reparation to result in rectification so that the same structural context of violence and discrimination is not re-established. It has also interpreted the requirement of guarantees of non-repetition to require a wide range of policy reforms and practices to address structural failures that enabled the violation.
This aspect rarely gets the attention it deserves when people put forward proposals for redressing inequalities. Too often, proposals focus merely on transferring money to people or countries affected, without stopping the harmful conduct which is creating the need for reparation. Take, for instance, the proposals to tax fossil fuel companies to help raise funds for repairing the damage caused by the climate crisis. The proposal may serve many beneficial purposes, but ultimately would not change the business model of fossil fuel companies, which focuses on maximising shareholder wealth accumulation while externalising harms to people all over the world. Reparation from fossil fuel companies, by way of contrast, would require that companies acknowledge their liability for enabling and exacerbating the climate crisis for over eight decades and pay compensation rather than a tax payment to another government, which may or may not reach the victims. Such compensation must crucially be accompanied by governmental action to curb the ability of fossil fuel companies to engage in any future harmful conduct. This goes beyond restricting emissions to addressing the underlying systems and rules which have enabled companies to use their economic power to block regulations to phase out their product. The longer we delay such action, the more opportunity we give those companies to dissipate their assets and escape liability while exponentially amplifying risks and harms for people and making it harder for poorer countries to shift to non-carbon-based energy.
The transformative potential of reparations lies in its capacity to address the structural causes of issues like gross wealth inequality or climate injustice, including their racial dimensions. Bringing the reparations framework to bear on deeply entrenched economic and political systems is challenging. But it offers us the best pathway for breaking cycles of abuse and inequalities that manifest and magnify across generations.
Reparation is possible when there is political will
Past reparation programs show us that many of the legal or other barriers to reparation claims can be overcome when governments want such programs to succeed. The reparations made by Germany for the Holocaust are still considered the largest and most comprehensive program of reparations ever implemented. According to the US State Department, the German government has paid around US$86.6 billion in restitution and compensation to Holocaust victims and their heirs from 1945 to 2018. Germany has also identified objects looted by the Nazis, including artworks and other objects, and returned 16,000 objects to survivors and their heirs over the last 20 years.
This discussion should not be taken to suggest that the reparations were a sufficient atonement for the horrific violations that were committed or to downplay the complex and painful process involved for victims in claiming or even accepting reparations. Because of continuing racism and underrepresentation, Roma and Sinti victims, for example, struggled to be recognised as victims of Nazi persecution and were either explicitly excluded or left out of compensation schemes. However, in terms of the feasibility of reparations, the program is notable for the way it overcame barriers that victims still face in most contexts. These innovations include governmental expropriation of property that had been confiscated by the Nazis to ensure its restitution to victims. When living descendants could not be traced (something that is often referred to as a challenge in reparation claims for slavery and/or colonialism), specific organisations such as the Claims Conference were allowed to claim and disburse funds for the benefit of other victims. This type of umbrella body, as well as the UN Compensation Commission for Iraq, set up by the Security Council in 1991, are a useful model for situations involving fair resolution of reparation claims across groups of victims, or their heirs, from different nationalities.
Holocaust reparations were also notable for the pressure that victims’ groups and some governments brought to bear on companies and private actors. These efforts sought to redress their unjust enrichment at the cost of victims of the Holocaust, more than four decades after these events occurred. This includes German companies that had benefited from forced and slave labour, the Swiss Banks Holocaust Settlement, and the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, which targeted insurance companies for unpaid policies. The US government played a critical role in this process and used an array of legal and diplomatic tools, which brought pressure on the companies and governments where they were headquartered, as did lawsuits against many of these companies. There can be little doubt that the companies, or really their directors, agreed to contribute to reparation schemes or settlements because they were worried about legal, financial and reputational risks of not doing so. While the publicity and pressure brought to bear on the companies by the US government and Jewish organisations may be difficult to replicate in other contexts, this underlines the role that governments can play in enabling reparation by companies.
The Holocaust reparations program demonstrates that the choice to make adequate reparations is essentially a political one, whether or not it is legally required. It is also worth focusing on how governments have found ways to manage or ignore the economic impact of reparations when they thought they were necessary, or they benefited from such programs. The British government borrowed £20 million to compensate slave owners between 1835 and 1843, and part of this compensation was even awarded in the form of government stock. As the Tax Justice Network points out, this amounted to 40% of the Treasury’s annual income or 5% of British GDP at the time. The loan was so large, it took till 2015 and contributions from generations of taxpayers to repay it. Not a penny of this money was paid to the people who had been enslaved, who instead were forced to continue to work as ‘apprentices’.
Similarly, France imposed a tribute of 125 million gold Francs (estimated to be the equivalent of US$560 million at current values) on Haiti as compensation for lost revenues from slavery as a condition for France to recognise its independence. Haiti had to borrow the money from French banks to make payments to France for over a century, locking it into a cycle of debt that fundamentally undermined the country’s economic development. The French economist, Thomas Piketty, has pointed out that the tribute represented about 300% of Haiti’s national yearly income. He has argued that France should pay €30 billion to Haiti in restitution (applying the same proportion to Haiti’s current national income). He has also said:
“The notion that France cannot afford such a payment does not hold up. While the sum is significant, it represents less than 1% of France’s public debt (€3.3 trillion) and barely 0.2% of private wealth (€15 trillion): It’s like a drop in the ocean.”
These examples highlight the fact that richer governments only hide behind a scarcity narrative for lack of reparation when the victims are people of colour and/or belong to colonised countries. Piketty’s statement also puts into context the underlying biases around unaffordability based on who the recipient of reparations is. Haiti had to pay a sum to France that amounted to 300% of its national yearly income, while an equivalent reparation amounting to 0.2% of private wealth in France is dismissed as unfeasible.
The money exists and can be found if France actually wants to take responsibility, as Macron has said it should. However, so far this has only taken the form of setting up a joint commission to study the two countries’ ‘shared past’ rather than to repair the harms of this past.
Transformative reparations to build a just world
The International Court of Justice delivered its landmark advisory opinion on the obligations of states in respect of climate change in July this year. The Court confirmed that the failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from greenhouse gas emissions – including through fossil fuel production or consumption, the granting of exploration licenses or provision of subsidies – may constitute an internationally wrongful act which the state can be held responsible for. The Court clarified that such responsibility includes the responsible state making full reparation for the damage caused, to ensure cessation by revoking all measures which constitute the wrongful act, and to offer guarantees of non-repetition. As we are all aware, international decisions are not automatically complied with. This ruling – the result of a heroic fight that originated from a group of young students and small Island states – requires us to build on their efforts.
The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has stated in his book Reconsidering Reparations:
“It is not that every aspect of today’s global racial empire is rooted in the impacts of climate change. But every aspect of tomorrow’s global racial empire will be. Climate change is set not just to redistribute social advantages, but to do so in a way that compounds and locks in distributional injustices we’ve inherited from history. If we don’t intervene powerfully, it will reverse the gains toward justice that our ancestors fought so bitterly for….”
Reparation from those responsible for the climate crisis, both states and companies, however, requires more than just some compensation from these entities. It, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò says, requires us to address the distributional injustices which determine who bears the most consequences of this crisis, despite contributing the least to it. These distributional injustices are closely tied to racial capitalism, which Cedric Robinson described as a mode of production constructed along racial lines. His analysis highlighted how capitalism built its wealth from the transatlantic slave trade and colonial exploitation and continues to be inseparably linked to racism. Racial capitalism lies at the core of climate injustice.
Campaigns for reparations for the climate crisis, slavery or any harms caused by systems generating inequalities offer us the chance to build a new and more just world. We can do so if we have the courage and determination to use the process to go beyond the surface and radically change the systems and structures – particularly racial capitalism, which have created and sustained multiple forms of inequalities for centuries.
First published on 15 September 2025 by SOMO