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STATEMENT FROM THE CHAIR OF THE CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY, THE HON. PHILIP J. PIERRE, PRIME MINISTER OF SAINT LUCIA | REPARATORY JUSTICE The Caribbean Community has taken careful note of the remarks published by the Right Honourable Andy Burnham MP, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, on Britain's role in the transatlantic trafficking and chattel enslavement of African bodies ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting which opens in Antigua and Barbuda on Sunday. Let me begin by recognising what is new. Prime Minister Burnham has expressed personal sorrow and regret for the suffering caused by slavery and its continuing effects on the world today. He has said that he is open to a formal apology on behalf of the British state, and he has offered a structured dialogue with those affected. No British Prime Minister has gone this far before. It would be wrong of us not to say so, and we welcome it in the spirit in which it appears to be offered. For more than a decade, this Community has asked for exactly such a dialogue. We are ready to engage. But friendship requires candour, and so I must be equally clear about where we differ. The Caribbean Community does not accept that reparations are "not the right answer". Nor do we accept the argument that responsibility falls away because the people of Britain today played no personal part in these crimes. Reparatory justice has never been about individual guilt. It is about the responsibility of states and institutions — and that responsibility does not expire with the passing of generations. We do believe that the successive generations continue to be the beneficiaries, materially, socially and psychologically of that crime of racialised chattel enslavement. Read the Chair's complete Statement here: caricom.org/statement-from-t…