Each year, around this time, Caribbean leaders join other presidents and prime ministers in convening in New York to participate in the annual United Nations General Debate. And each…
“Instead of lynchings, we now enjoy the spectacle of the fraternal-order-of-police executing blacks and browns as sport.”
President Barack Obama listens while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes a statement to the press after a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House Sept. 30, 2014.
The principle of reparations is as old as warfare and humankind and is well established in international law. The principle requires the party who has caused injuries to another to redress the damage caused either through monetary means, rehabilitation or material labour. The principle has been generally enforced by the victor on the vanquished and has become the core of the peace settlement. Its punitive streak has been evident quite early, in 202bc, when Rome exacted reparations from a defeated Carthage, an African city state, at the end of the second Punic war. It was at Versailles (1919), however, that a defeated Germany was constrained to yield to exacting demands, the trenchant and prescient criticisms of which would launch J M Keynes into international acclaim. Seeming to be magnanimous, the succeeding generation would believe that it was rather generous, again with a defeated Germany, at the peace constructed at Yalta, Potsdam and Paris (1946).
From a new Brookings Institute analysis by fellow Jonathan Rothwell released yesterday.
Baltimore, Oct. 1, 2014….A major conference bringing together leaders in the fields of health care, law and social services will kick off a national campaign against human trafficking which has been described as a “horrible form of modern day slavery.”
The summer of 2014 was a summer of protest: African-Americans took to the streets with a simple but ambitious demand: “Treat us like human beings.”
NEW YORK, United States, Monday September 29, 2014, CMC – Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla has called for “profound reform” of the United Nations, starting with the 15-member Security Council, saying that the Secretary-General should be “an advocator and guarantor of international peace and security.”
As governments and the civil society movement prepare for a major conference on reparations in idyllic Antigua next month, the Jamaicans have not surprisingly fired the first salvo in the battle over the amount that nations such as Britain would have to pay for their role in the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Profiteers and their political allies don’t give up the ship without mobilizing all their resources for the fight. They will grant small concessions, window dress their past practice, even invite their most intransigent enemies into the tent, but they will not change unless a political force emerges that compels them to do so.
Above: Tear gas rains down on a woman kneeling in the street after a demonstration in Ferguson on August 17.