Lord Anthony Gifford presented a paper to the First Pan-African Congress on Reparations, Abuja, Nigeria, April 27-29, 1993. The paper sought to conceptualise a legal framework for the formulation and prosecution of the claim for Reparations.
-Here are excerpts:
---------------------------------

I am a lawyer who has striven for human rights and justice in many parts of the world. Much of my work has concerned the manifold injustices which are caused by the evil of racism. Especially, I have stood in solidarity with Black people in Britain in their bitter and continuing struggle for equal rights, and with the liberation movements of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa, in the still unfinished cause of complete African liberation. I now live and practice law in Jamaica.

I believe that the cause of Reparations to Africa and Africans in the Diaspora is rooted in fundamental justice - a justice which over-arches every struggle and campaign which African people have waged to assert their human dignity. For the iniquities perpetrated against African people today - whether in South Africa by the apartheid regime, in Mozambique and Angola by terrorist forms of destabilisation, in Britain and the USA by racist attacks and by systems of discrimination - are the continuing consequences, the damages as lawyers would say, flowing from the 400-years-long atrocity of the slave system.

For me as a lawyer it is essential to locate the claim for Reparations within a framework of law and justice. If this were merely an appeal to the conscience of the White world, it would be misconceived. For while there have been many committed individuals and movements of solidarity in the White world, its political and economic power centres have evidenced a ruthless lack of conscience when it comes to Black and African peoples.

But in my experience progress has been made when the powers that rule in the white world have been compelled to recognise that the rights of non-white peoples are founded in justice. It is then that forms of legal redress, which may not have existed before, have been devised.
For example, it used to be perfectly legal in Britain, only 25 years ago, for landlords or employers to put up notices which said "VACANCIES - NO COLOUREDS". Today any employer who discriminates on racial grounds can be required by a Tribunal to pay compensation.

So it is with the claim for Reparations - once you accept the truth of three propositions
a. That the mass kidnap and enslavement of Africans was the most wicked criminal enterprise in recorded human history,
b. that no compensation was ever paid by any of the perpetrators to any of the sufferers, and
c. that the consequences of the crime continue to be massive, both in terms of the enrichment of the descendants of the perpetrators, and in terms of the impoverishment of Africa and the descendants of Africans then the justice of the claim for Reparations is proved beyond reasonable doubt.

 

Those who may say that that is all very true in theory, but that in practice there is no mechanism to enforce the claim, or no willingness of the white world to recognise it, I would answer with a Latin legal maxim: ubi jus, ibi remedium: where there is a right, there must be a remedy. An injustice without a remedy is abhorred by lawyers like a vacuum is abhorred by nature. Once the claim is well-founded in legal principle, and well-recognised by the international community, remedies and mechanisms will be found.

Even so, given the unique, massive and multi-faceted nature of the claim, international jurists will be needed who can show corresponding creativity and imagination. International law has never been static. New structures have often been devised to give effect to recognised principles. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal is an example of new legal thinking which brought a measure justice following the atrocities of Nazism. The International Court of Justice, where states could settle disputes with each other by law rather than by war, was unknown at the start of this century.