Pilots of reparations

Pilots of reparations include compensation for individuals or groups who have been historically subjected to harm or injustice (e.g. slavery, indigenous, holocaust, colonial reparations). These programmes may take various forms, including financial compensation, educational initiatives, healthcare provisions, or other measures aimed at addressing historical and systemic wrongs. 

Reparations start with the acknowledgement that centuries of harm and injustice have led to stark social and economic inequalities of the present. Pilots have been grappling with how to measure and account for past and ongoing harms. Such widespread and intergenerational harms are difficult to redress through existing legal paradigms that seek proven quantifiable losses between individual perpetrators and individual victims. Statutes of limitations and principles of non-retroactivity present legal barriers, while political barriers include how to redress the social advantages enjoyed by the powerful alongside the losses experienced by the abused. 

Some reparation pilots have followed specific wars and human rights violations. In Germany, the government paid $86.8 billion in restitution and compensation to Holocaust victims and their heirs and returned 16,000 stolen objects to survivors and their heirs. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided victims of apartheid the opportunity to share their stories and receive financial compensation, health and education benefits as well as symbolic reparations like commemorations. The California for African American Reparations Task Force is studying and developing reparation proposals for African Americans to counter effects of slavery and systemic racism, which include land restitutions and cultural preservation efforts. In New Zealand, reparations included the return of land (16 sites of cultural significance), financial redress ($30 million plus interest), cultural revitalization (a fund of $1,023,454), and greater land rights (the right to purchase the Te Wera Crown Forest). Decades of negotiation have divided tribes, however, and health issues including cancer, stroke and cardiovascular disease remain high for Māori people. 

Recent pilots are addressing colonialism and enslavement across geographical borders. For example, the Netherlands recently apologised for the country’s role in slavery and established a fund of €200m to address present-day effects. The apology was seen by some descendants of enslaved people in Surname and the Caribbean as having been sprung on them with little collaboration. 

A legal framework grounded in universal human rights posits that reparations are obligatory, not optional. The landscape of reparations is evolving rapidly, with collaborative processes for arriving at reparations a focus, as well as popularising the idea of reparations as an investment in the future.