❓WHAT HAPPENED: Funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations has been funneled into a campaign seeking slavery reparations from Britain.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: The Open Society Foundations (OSF), George Soros, Caribbean and African campaigners, the African Union, and the University of the West Indies.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Since 2014, with significant developments in 2023 and 2024, involving locations such as Barbados, Ghana, and New York.
💬KEY QUOTE: “Litigation is a powerful, but underutilised, tool in the African reparations movement.” – OSF-backed organizers
🎯IMPACT: The campaign aims to pressure the British government and other Western governments to pay out reparations to ethnic minorities and the Third World.
The Open Society Foundations (OSF), founded by George Soros and currently chaired by his son Alex Soros, has played a major role in lobbying efforts to extract slavery reparations from Britain. Drawing from its roughly $23 billion endowment, the organization has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars toward groups advocating for compensation.
The reparations push gained formal momentum in 2014 through the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and broadened in 2023 to encompass African countries—despite the fact that many African rulers profited handsomely from the international slave trade, and continued to practice it at home until being forced to give it up by the West in general and Britain in particular.
OSF has helped facilitate collaboration between Caribbean and African advocates and officials, including by organizing a “study tour” in Barbados and by backing a significant summit in Ghana. That gathering contributed to a unified declaration committing to seek remedies for supposed historical injustices.
OSF’s support has included grants such as $350,000 to the University of the West Indies in 2023 to promote awareness of “reparatory justice” and foster stronger Caribbean-Africa ties, along with $300,000 to Ghana’s foreign ministry that same year. In addition, the foundation helped organize a 2024 summit in New York, where the leader of Barbados called for the Church of England to provide reparations for its role in slavery.
Bolstered by this backing, the African Union has advanced its own reparations initiative and is exploring legal avenues to apply pressure on Britain. The OSF-funded African Judges and Jurists Forum has focused on crafting legal arguments and cases to push the reparations agenda.
Notably, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in general in 1833. It then spent decades at considerable cost attempting to stamp out the slave trade globally, with the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy intercepting around 1,600 slave ships and freeing around 150,000 slaves, losing up to 2,000 sailors in the process. The British also worked hard to stamp out slavery in African kingdoms such as Ashanti and Dahomey, as well as the Arabs’ slave trade in East Africa and the Barbary slave trade in North Africa, which targeted white Christians.
Image by World Economic Forum/swiss-image.ch/Michael Wuertenberg.
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