On 7 September 2026, Jamaica, which remains a Commonwealth Country with King Charles III as its head of state, will formally present a petition to the King with three questions about the legality of transatlantic chattel slavery and the UK’s responsibility to make reparations. Jamaica’s petition is part of a decade-long coordinated campaign of Caribbean (CARICOM) countries to seek reparations for slavery. It comes amidst increasing momentum for a wider international movement seeking to establish transatlantic chattel slavery as a wrong for which redress is owed as a matter of international law. Jamaica’s Prime Minister has called the move a “watershed moment for CARICOM and the broader global movement for reparatory justice.”
Jamaica is asking King Charles to refer its questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The Judicial Committee descends from bodies within the Privy Council that had both advisory roles and acted as tribunals of last resort for the entire British Empire. Today, the Committee mostly hears appeals, both civil and criminal, from Commonwealth Countries (with appeals from defendants sentenced to death in the Caribbean among the most prominent). Although rarely invoked, Section 4 of the 1833 Statute that created the Committee also gives it the power to issue advisory opinions on matters that “cannot be effectively decided in ordinary courts.” The King may choose (or refuse) to refer such matters to the Committee at his discretion, and typically also acts on the advice of his ministers. So in Jamaica’s bid to reach the Privy Council, King Charles is the gatekeeper, and Jamaica is at the gate.
The King will almost certainly refuse to refer Jamaica’s questions to the Committee. Still, Jamaica’s decision to submit a public petition asking for a reckoning with slavery and its legacies has enormous symbolic and political power. By petitioning the King to seek advice from the Judicial Committee, Jamaica is engaging the judicial heir of the institution charged with overseeing the colonies and ensuring that colonial law did not contravene English law. In a sense, Jamaica is asking this institution to audit its own historical performance.
Jamaica’s petition is shot through with other poignant ironies. First, the Jamaican government is simultaneously working to remove King Charles as its head of state. Petitioning the Judicial Committee, a legal residue of Britain’s Empire, is a kind of swansong to the Crown’s power. Second, while the King can technically use his discretion to refer questions to the Committee, he typically does so only on the advice of his ministers, who are part of the government of the United Kingdom. The King is, separately and simultaneously, the King of Jamaica, and it is in that capacity that Jamaica addresses him. So the King has competing loyalties—to Jamaica on the one hand, and to the UK Government, on the other. But the competition is unlikely to be a fair one.
Jamaica’s petition includes three questions, the first of which is especially incisive:
The First Question: The Status of Slavery in English Law
Jamaica’s first question is whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica and their enslavement there was lawful at the time, or whether these practices were contrary to the fundamental principles of the common law, such that colonial slavery statutes were “void as repugnant to fundamental principles of English law.” While the King’s powers in England were limited by the rights of Parliament and statutory law conferring individual rights, the colonial territories were ruled by royal prerogative, with the Crown conferring powers on colonial governments. Colonial governments could promulgate laws that would apply locally, as long as they were not repugnant to English law. The limits on the Crown’s power in England did not extend to the colonies, and colonial governments’ discretion to promulgate their own laws created a legal grey zone.
Jamaica’s question about the status of slavery under English law brings the legal tensions that characterized the patchwork law of empire into sharp focus. Although colonial law regulated slavery (the first Slave Codes were enacted by the colonial government in Barbados in 1661, and were subsequently adopted elsewhere), slavery had no foundation in English law itself. Because there was no law expressly authorizing enslavement, some enslaved persons who made their way to England from the colonies were able to successfully petition for their freedom. The status of enslaved people in the colonies as chattels remained contested until 1732, when Parliament enacted the Debt Recovery Act. The Act allowed English creditors to pursue “houses, lands, and negroes” for outstanding debts. Still, even after Parliament implied that English creditors could treat enslaved Africans as chattel when recovering debt, an English judge refused to recognize the ownership rights of a colonial enslaver who sought to assert them over an enslaved man he had brought to England. In Somerset v Stewart (1772), Lord Mansfield wrote that an institution as odious as slavery was “incapable of being introduced [to England] on any reasons, moral or political” and that “nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” Mansfield understood that the decision had the potential to cause confusion by highlighting a gap between the laws of England and the practice of slavery in its territories, but he insisted that “whatever inconveniences… may follow,” Mr. Somerset could not be held in bondage under English law.
Across the centuries in which transatlantic slavery generated its fortunes, no situation forced the question of whether colonial statutes regulating slavery were “repugnant to the laws of England” and therefore void. This may seem striking, but the material interests of the Crown and the class of absentee Plantation owners steadily buying its way into Parliament explain why so many were perfectly content for the legal murkiness to persist. The enormous profits generated by plantation slavery allowed the Crown to rake in duties and plantation owners to amass the levels of private wealth that helped make the Industrial Revolution possible.
Jamaica’s first question takes on this profitable murkiness.
The Second Question: The Status of Slavery Under International Law
Jamaica’s second question asks whether the transport and enslavement constituted crimes against humanity (CAH) under international law for which the UK bears responsibility. In invoking CAH in reference to slavery, Jamaica’s question tracks a rhetorical move in the broader global movement for reparations. The Durban Declaration of 2001 described slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity and said that they “should always have been so.” In 2026, Ghana introduced a Resolution in the General Assembly describing slavery as “the gravest crime against humanity.” The notion that slavery today constitutes a crime against humanity is not in dispute. Framing the question in terms of CAH raises two intractable legal issues: a temporal one and a definitional one.
First, Jamaica’s question gets at something both the Durban Declaration and Ghana’s Resolution elide. It is the thorniest part of the contemporary reparations debate: Was transatlantic chattel slavery illegal at the time it was practiced? The position of the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States is that slavery did not violate international law at the time, and that the present-day international law cannot and should not be applied retroactively. Furthermore, to the extent that the Crown or the UK engages with Jamaica’s questions, it will probably point to a further but distinct temporal issue: that “Crimes against humanity” is a legal category that entered positive law only after 1945, when it was invoked to try Nazi leaders. To ask whether conduct during and prior to the 19th century “constituted” CAH is to reach for a legal concept that did not yet exist.
Patrick Robinson, the Jamaican jurist and former judge of the International Court of Justice, has argued that a principle of humanity condemning the traffic in enslaved people ran through the whole period, so that “the substance of a prohibition preceded the doctrinal label.” But the legal instruments Robinson’s argument leans on, such as the 1815 Vienna Declaration, referred to the slave trade, which was more consistently condemned than the institution of slavery. Other scholars, including me, have argued that transatlantic slavery violated international legal norms of the time, which technically permitted enslavement, but not the brutal, racialized, hereditary enslavement that accompanied the emergence of capitalism in the New World. But, as written, Jamaica’s question asks whether slavery was a crime against humanity—not whether it violated international law more broadly.
The framing of slavery as a crime against humanity creates a further difficulty: CAH is a category that belongs to international criminal law, which assigns guilt to individuals, not states. At Nuremberg, the Tribunal declared that “crimes against international law are committed by men, not abstract entities”; the International Law Commission eventually abandoned the inclusion of a category of state crimes in its Draft Articles on State Responsibility. The Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention (which, if enacted, would be a standalone treaty for CAH, similar to the Genocide Convention) does provide, at Article 3, that a state must not engage in acts that constitute crimes against humanity. However, the bulk of the Draft Convention focuses on individual criminal liability, setting out how states should criminalize and prosecute CAH domestically and cooperate to bring those who commit these crimes to justice. For better or for worse, jurisprudence suggests that states are not the kind of defendant that the notion of CAH contemplates.
These difficulties could have been avoided by framing the second question around whether slavery and the slave trade violated international law more generally. This would have invited a reckoning with recent scholarship on this question (for example: here, here, and here), which has argued that transatlantic chattel slavery violated the law of nations and general principles of international law as they would have been understood in the early modern period. Despite these difficulties, the question’s final clause pulls it back toward firmer ground. In asking whether the UK “bears responsibility,” it puts the real issue to the Committee: not whether Britain violated international criminal law, but whether it is responsible for a wrong. That is a question of state responsibility, and it is the heart of the matter.
The Third Question: Responsibility for Slavery’s Contemporary Legacies
Jamaica’s third question asks whether the UK owes the Jamaican people a remedy for both the historical wrong and its continuing consequences. That final clause opens a distinct and more durable route to reparation, one not mired in the status of slavery under eighteenth-century law. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism Tendayi Achiume, have pressed the point that slavery’s legacy continues long after abolition: it persists in structures of racial disadvantage whose maintenance is a present matter, engaging present obligations under international law. Redress for the enduring legacies of slavery may be owed as a matter of contemporary human rights law even if Britain refuses to concede that slavery was unlawful when it occurred. The obligation attaches to the enduring legacy rather than the underlying historical wrong.
Jamaica’s Petition Forces a Confrontation
The King will almost certainly not refer these questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as Jamaica has requested him to do. By settled convention, the King exercises his discretionary power to refer questions to the Committee on the advice of his ministers. This means, in substance, that the U.K. government will help decide whether a U.K. appellate body may examine the U.K.’s liability for the harms of slavery. The U.K. government’s position is not difficult to predict.
Still, even if it does not move forward, Jamaica’s petition is meaningful. The King’s refusal to entertain Jamaica’s questions—made as a public petition from a Commonwealth country—would likewise be a public, concrete act of avoidance. Jamaica cannot compel an answer, but in submitting this petition, it is snatching from the Crown the ability to maintain the silence that has served it for three centuries. The petition converts silence from a background condition into a public act. Although the reckoning Jamaica and other Caribbean countries long for may never come from the Privy Council, its demand for it is now on the record.