Rolston Anglin MP, Minister for Education and Training, told The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) on 21 September 2026 that CARICOM's reparations campaign is "up to CARICOM" because the Cayman Islands is not a member state. The Cayman Islands is a non-voting associate member of the bloc that is demanding reparations from Britain, and a territory of the state that is refusing to pay them. The Office of the Governor told TCJ on 24 September 2026 that "the UK has been clear that we do not and will not pay reparations".

The question arises because CARICOM's reparations manifesto, approved by Heads of Government at their 51st Regular Meeting in Gros Islet, Saint Lucia, on 5 to 8 July 2026, names the Cayman Islands as a territory where "the colonial system is still hegemonic", and because a 2027 to 2031 Action Plan for Reparatory Justice, considered at the Third CARICOM Regional Conference on Reparations in Barbados on 17 to 19 September 2026, calls on nations to overhaul school curricula and train young people as reparations advocates. Cayman is one of five British territories the manifesto lists in a footnote as "Non-voting" associate members. It has no vote when Heads of Government approve a document such as the manifesto, and the action plan is addressed to CARICOM nations.

Whether that leaves Cayman inside or outside the claim is the question TCJ put to the Government. Isaac Rankine MP, Minister for Youth, Sports, Culture and Heritage, attended the Saint Lucia meeting for the Cayman Islands, according to the communiqué of 10 July 2026, which lists him among the associate members present and records that Heads approved the manifesto at that meeting. TCJ emailed the Cabinet Office and Rankine's Ministry on 21 September 2026 asking whether Cayman was represented in Barbados, whether the Government accepts or disputes the manifesto's description of the territory, and whether Cabinet has taken any decision on participation in CARICOM reparations work. Neither had responded by the time of publication.

What the Minister said

Anglin was asked on 21 September 2026 whether his Ministry had received the action plan and whether any change to the national curriculum on enslavement or reparatory justice was under consideration. In an on-the-record telephone interview with a TCJ reporter that day he said: "CARICOM, that's up to CARICOM, whatever they want to do. I wasn't at that meeting. I wasn't obliged to be at that meeting. We're not a member state. We took up associate membership to simply try to be part of the Caribbean family." He said "you have to be an independent state to be a full member of CARICOM". The CARICOM record differs on that point. Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory, has been a full member state since 1974, according to the CARICOM Secretariat, and its Premier, Reuben Meade, is listed in the July communiqué among the members of the Conference in attendance. The same communiqué records that Heads of Government reviewed applications for full membership from Bermuda and the Turks and Caicos Islands, both British territories and both associate members.

In an emailed reply on 24 September 2026 Anglin said his Ministries "are committed to openness and transparency and will respond with accurate and complete information utilizing whatever reasonable time is required". Anglin also holds the Finance and Economic Development portfolio. The written questions had not been answered at the time of publication, and any response will be reported when it is received.

How Cayman came to be inside the bloc

Cayman's associate membership gives it a seat but not a vote, and that distinction runs through everything CARICOM has decided on reparations since 2013. The Cayman Islands became an associate member on 16 May 2002, the date of the CARICOM Secretariat's announcement, the fourth British territory to do so after the British Virgin Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands in July 1991 and Anguilla in July 1999. Bermuda followed in July 2003. When Heads of Government met in Trinidad and Tobago in July 2013, the Secretariat said afterwards, they agreed "to the establishment of a National Reparations Committee in each Member State with the Chair of each Committee sitting on a CARICOM Reparations Commission", and named the Heads of Government of Barbados, as chair, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Haiti, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago to provide political oversight. The Secretariat described the Community's approach as one that "would be to hold a development conversation and to use all reasonable avenues to reach an amicable solution on reparations". The decision was framed around member states, and no associate member has been asked to form a committee.

The manifesto describes the Community it speaks for as "home to approximately sixteen million people", and its footnote listing the five British associates, Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands, as "Non-voting, British colonies" is the only place the document sets out where they stand. It does not say whether the associates are among those on whose behalf the 10 demands are made, and it does not say they are excluded. The passage that names Cayman does so in a different context, as an example of the colonial arrangements the manifesto says persist in the region: "Decolonisation must be regarded as an integral part of the reparatory justice process," the section says, and it lists the territories of the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and the U.S.

That is the passage on which the Cayman Islands Government has been asked, and has not yet said, whether it agrees. The Governor's office, asked the same question from the UK side, did not address it.

The UK side

The Governor's office reply frames the matter from the other side of Cayman's constitutional position. "The UK condemns the horrific impacts of the transatlantic slave trade and recognises the strength of feeling it arouses," it said. "The UK has been clear that we do not and will not pay reparations." It said the UK Government "remains committed to open and respectful dialogue with all its partners on the legacies of the past", and that the UK's relationship with Cayman "will be further discussed during the Joint Ministerial Council which Premier Ebanks will join in November". The council brings together UK ministers and the elected leaders of the Overseas Territories, including Premier André Ebanks MP. TCJ had asked whether the UK position applies to the Cayman Islands as a British Overseas Territory and whether the Governor's office had been consulted on Cayman's participation in the bloc's reparations work. On the second point the Office said: "The Cayman Islands Government has associate membership of CARICOM, and participates in meetings under that remit." The reply, sent on the Governor's behalf by the Office's policy adviser, did not comment on the manifesto's description of the Cayman Islands as a territory where the colonial system is still hegemonic.

The UK position it restated is the one Downing Street gave on 7 September 2026, when Jamaica lodged a petition asking King Charles III to refer three legal questions on slavery to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Andy Burnham said that day that "the UK does not and will not pay reparations", while describing the trade as "abhorrent", Reuters reported. It is also the position the UK's representative James Kariuki gave the United Nations General Assembly on 25 March 2026, when the UK abstained on resolution A/RES/80/250, which declared the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity. Kariuki told the Assembly: "There is equally no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time those acts were committed, violations of international law", the Associated Press reported. The resolution passed with 123 votes in favour, three against and 52 abstentions.

What CARICOM is asking for

CARICOM's manifesto, titled The CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice: A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment, is the second revision of a plan first adopted in 2014 and revised in 2018. The campaign's machinery dates from July 2013, when Heads of Government meeting in Trinidad and Tobago established a Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on Reparations and the CARICOM Reparations Commission, made up of the chairs of national reparations committees with the University of the West Indies as a constituent member. Professor Sir Hilary Beckles has chaired the Commission since its public launch in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in September 2013. The Commission's own timeline records a Regional Strategic and Operational Plan adopted by the Sub-Committee in June 2014; the plan considered in Barbados covers 2027 to 2031.

The manifesto sets out 10 demands: a full and formal apology; an Indigenous peoples development programme; repatriation and resettlement; restitution of cultural heritage; remedying the public health crisis; capacity-building through education and training; compensation for gender-based violence; psychological rehabilitation; the right to sovereignty and development through technology; and debt cancellation, monetary compensation and decolonisation. It puts no overall figure on the claim. It does put figures on the other side of the ledger. The British Act of 1833, it says, "provided that the enslaved would join with the state in making reparations payments to the enslavers": approximately 700,000 enslaved people were assigned a replacement value of £47,000 million at emancipation, the British Slave Compensation Act of 1837 paid £20 million to enslavers, and a further period of unpaid labour, "initially ten years, reduced to four years", was worth £27 million to the former owners. Of the £20 million, its footnote states, "approximately £16.5 million or 82.5% of that sum was paid to enslavers in the British colonised Caribbean", through "forty-six thousand individual payments". The manifesto does not identify how much of that sum was paid to enslavers in the Cayman Islands, and TCJ has not sought to establish it for this report.

In a section headed Decolonisation in the Caribbean it says: "In some territories, the colonial system is still hegemonic. For example, several countries remain non-sovereign territories of European nations", and lists the British Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Cayman Islands, Bermuda and Turks and Caicos Islands under the United Kingdom alongside French, U.S. and Dutch territories. Its education chapter states that "CARICOM demands reparations to repair the education system they inherited from colonialism" and argues that former colonial nations have a legal responsibility to fund that repair, including through technology transfer. CARICOM Secretary-General Dr Carla Barnett told the Barbados conference's opening ceremony on 17 September 2026 that "twelve CARICOM Member States have established national reparations commissions or committees". Cayman, as an associate member, is not among them. The manifesto records that the Commission was constituted from the chairs of 13 national committees in 2013; it lists Cayman only in the footnote among the five non-voting British associates, and does not otherwise address the position of the associate members in the claim.

The 10 demands in detail

The manifesto's first demand is for "official apologies on behalf of all Africans from former enslaving nations in Europe and beyond", to be issued "either by the Monarch or Head of Government". It says an apology should include "acknowledgement of the harms their nations, institutions, and citizens caused", "clear identification of the victims and perpetrators of the crime", "formal expression of apology to all victims and their descendants" and "a commitment to reparatory justice". The document distinguishes an apology from a statement of regret, and says the former is a legal as well as a moral act: "The moral and ethical frameworks of all modern societies hold that criminal wrongdoing should be met with remorse and remedy."

The fourth demand, restitution of cultural heritage, falls within Rankine's culture and heritage portfolio. The manifesto says CARICOM "demands reparations and cultural restitution for the restoration and preservation of Indigenous, African-Caribbean cultural heritage and the establishment of sustainable cultural institutions", and calls for the return of artefacts "to their places of origin in the Caribbean". It describes "the colonial agenda of cultural erasure" and says the imposition of Christianity "led to significant cultural erasure, psychological trauma, and systematic oppression, the effects of which persist today".

The fifth demand, on public health, rests on figures the manifesto draws from published research. It cites a 2019 study in the Pan American Journal of Public Health of mortality data from 22 Caribbean countries and territories between 1999 and 2014, which found that "every year 16,000 persons prematurely succumb to non-communicable diseases in the Caribbean region" and that "over 70% of all deaths in the region can be traced back to an NCD". It cites a 2017 study of 12 CARICOM countries finding that between 10% and 25% of adults have diabetes and between 20% and more than 50% have hypertension. The manifesto asserts that "the crisis has its roots in the colonial experience of the mass enslavement of Africans", and demands reparations to fund health infrastructure. Whether the Cayman Islands is among the 22 territories in the 2019 study is not stated.

The eighth demand, psychological rehabilitation, is the second place in the document where present-day colonies are treated as part of the harm to be repaired. It says that "a remnant of that determination to deny full human status and rights to people of African descent is to be found in the calculated refusal to facilitate the decolonisation of many still existing European and North American colonies and to confer upon the colonised their inherent rights to nationhood and self-determination".

The tenth demand "demands monetary compensation as reparations from enslaving nations, monarchies, churches, institutions, corporations and families, for loss of life and uncompensated labour, loss of liberty, personal injury, mental pain and anguish and gender-based violence", together with "cancellation of all CARICOM-European bilateral debts". It refers, in a footnote, to a compensation framework "elaborated in the P. Robinson and Brattle Group Report" but does not reproduce the figures. It argues that Caribbean states "were denied requested development support at independence" and "were forced to fund basic development through international borrowings", so that "this debt profile properly belongs to the governments of the colonising European countries".

The history the manifesto relies on

The document places the campaign in a line of demands stretching back before independence. It records that in 1957, "on the eve of the West Indies Federation", Caribbean leaders "demanded £200 million for economic development projects to be paid over ten years", and that "Britain rejected the request as it did all subsequent demands for the financing of nation building". It quotes a formulation it attributes to that era: that "an administering power ... is not entitled to extract for centuries all that can be got out of a colony and when that has been done to relieve itself of its obligations". It traces the present plan to the Abuja Proclamation of 1993, "the product of the inaugural Pan-African Conference on Reparations", and to Beckles's 2013 book Britain's Black Debt, published the year the Commission was formed.

Three conferences, one plan

The Barbados meeting was the third of its kind. The first CARICOM Regional Conference on Reparations was held in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on 15 to 17 September 2013, two months after the Trinidad decision, and marked the public launch of the Commission with Beckles as its first chair. The second, in Antigua and Barbuda in September 2014, was designed, the manifesto says, as "An Experts Symposium on Caribbean Reparation: Scientific Engagement and Community Mobilization" and was intended "to workshop and intensify the scientific and popular discourse on the Ten Point Plan", which had been adopted earlier that year. The manifesto says the 2014 plan "does not center reparations as a monetary transaction" but "focusses on collective and community-based development repair and upliftment".

When the CARICOM Secretariat announced the third conference on 2 September 2026, it said the meeting "will provide practical guidance on implementing the revised CARICOM Ten-Point Plan", would "assess global progress in the reparations movement, particularly in the context of the 25th Anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, the Second International Decade for People of African Descent, and the African Union Decade for Reparatory Justice", and would produce, as "a key outcome", the 2027 to 2031 action plan, "which will set measurable targets for joint action with partner organisations across the global African community". The Secretariat said participants would include activists from the U.S., Canada, the UK, the European Union and Latin America "alongside scholars, civil-society leaders, cultural figures, and youth delegates". The manifesto's second revision, the Secretariat said, was intended "to promote its global reach and solidarity", with "greater focus" on "gender dimensions, Africa-diaspora engagement, and the call for climate justice".

Education: what the manifesto says the region inherited

The sixth demand is the one the action plan's curriculum recommendations are built on, and it is addressed to governments that run their own schools. "CARICOM demands reparations to repair the education system they inherited from colonialism," it begins. "The aim is to eradicate illiteracy and foster a population that can engage with historical truths critically and constructively." It says European states "created and presided over a system of education that suppressed indigenous and African methods of knowledge development", that national governments "inherited a racialised education system, with basic facilities for largely illiterate black and Indigenous children", and that "Indigenous and African children were over exposed to negative images of themselves and their ancestry". The document says CARICOM states "allocate a significant percentage of their national budgets to reforming this inherited education order" and that this places "a subversive strain on the small economies". Its conclusion is that "there is a compelling case that former colonial nations have a legal responsibility to repair these legacies", through a programme that "could include technology transfer in the area of artificial intelligence, digital technologies and infrastructure investment".

The ninth demand, on technology, extends the argument. It quotes what it calls the British slogan of three centuries of colonial trade policy, "Not a nail is to be made in the colonies", and says that policy "ensured the technological, innovative and entrepreneurial underdevelopment of the Caribbean". CARICOM, it says, "demands the right to complete sovereignty and development with a special focus on technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship", to be treated "not as an act of goodwill, but as an enforceable right".

TCJ found no reference to the manifesto or the action plan among the Cayman Islands Government's published releases as at 27 September 2026, and the Ministry of Education and Training has not said whether it regards the education demand as one made on Cayman's behalf. The Cayman Islands Government sets the curriculum for its own government schools, and the action plan, as The Telegraph describes it, is a set of recommendations to CARICOM nations rather than an instrument with any force in a territory that does not vote on it. Whether any of the plan's proposals on teaching enslavement, resistance and reparatory justice will be considered here is a question the Ministry has said it will answer in its own time.

The action plan and schools

The Telegraph, reporting from Bridgetown on 20 September 2026, said the action plan text states that nations should "overhaul Caribbean educational curricula to centre and teach of Africa, indigenous, and Caribbean histories; enslavement, resistance, and reparatory justice" and should fund "institutional youth leadership" training so that a "succession" of advocates carries the campaign for decades. The same report said the Caribbean should "reframe its identity" by "stepping away from Western cultural conformity", with the renaming of public spaces that carry colonial legacies given as one route. Laleta Davis Mattis, a delegate from Jamaica who is listed by the Commission as co-chair of that country's National Council on Reparation, suggested that enslavement and reparations could be built into mathematics lessons, and another delegate called for a quota of under-35s at future conferences, The Telegraph reported. The newspaper reported that delegates were concerned that the movement's leading figures are ageing, and that Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who chairs the Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee and hosted the conference, suggested that smartphones and other modern comforts could be distracting young people from the cause and be behind a perceived "indifference". The Telegraph also reported that the action plan calls for "a solid, practical vision for what would constitute statutory compensation", a definition the campaign has not yet settled. TCJ has read The Telegraph report and has not seen the plan text, which it requested by email from the CARICOM Secretariat on 21 September 2026; the Secretariat had not supplied it by the time of publication.

Mottley told delegates that campaigners should "stop being advocates in a movement, and start being advocates in a case", and said: "We have no desire to bankrupt anybody but we have a desire for justice", GB News reported. Beckles told delegates on 18 September 2026 that the movement had entered what he called its final phase, Barbados Today reported.

The legal route The Telegraph describes

The Telegraph reported in the same 20 September 2026 dispatch that reparations "could be pursued by suing Britain under 'racial discrimination' treaties", and that the route under consideration runs through the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Britain is a party to the Convention. The newspaper said the argument being examined is that the harmful legacies of slavery persist "in areas from economic underdevelopment to racism against black people", so that "while Britain continues in its refusal to pay reparations, it is neglecting a duty to offer redress for an ongoing harm", which could open the country to a suit in the International Court of Justice. Neither the manifesto nor any CARICOM statement retrieved for this report sets out the Convention argument in those terms, and TCJ has not seen the action plan text in which The Telegraph says it appears.

What happens next

CARICOM leaders agreed in July that the campaign should have "strong visibility" at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda in November 2026, and to support the unveiling of the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial in Barbados the same month, according to the communiqué. November is also the month of the Joint Ministerial Council in London that the Governor's office says will take up the UK's relationship with Cayman. The Telegraph reported that the King is to visit the region; the Governor's office said it does not speculate on royal visits, "which are announced in the usual way by Buckingham Palace". King Charles III has referred Jamaica's petition to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Olivia Grange, Jamaica's Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, told that country's House of Representatives on 22 September 2026, according to the Jamaica Information Service, and Jamaica is awaiting the Committee's directions on next steps. The Cabinet Office has yet to say whether the Government as a whole shares the Minister's view of where the claim leaves the Cayman Islands.