Portugal must “pay the costs” of slavery and colonial crimes, says Marcelo | Colonialism

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa says that Portugal is responsible for the crimes committed during transatlantic slavery and the colonial era, and admitted that there is a need for compensation. In a conversation with foreign correspondents, the President of the Republic declared that Portugal “assumes full responsibility” for the mistakes of the past and that these crimes, including colonial massacres, had “costs”. “We have to pay the costs,” he added in statements cited by Reuters.

“Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there assets that were looted and were not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.”

The idea of ​​paying reparations or making other historic reparations for transatlantic slavery has been gaining traction around the world, including efforts to establish a special court to review the cases.

Marcelo had already stated, in 2023, that Portugal should apologize for transatlantic slavery and colonialism, but he stopped short of making a formal apology. At the event with the foreign press, the Portuguese President also defended that “recognizing the past and taking responsibility for it was more important than apologizing”.

Portugal was the largest trafficker in the transatlantic slave trade — more than half of the estimated 12 million globally.

The reactions of world governments to these demands have been quite diverse, gaining greater political visibility in recent years. For example, at the end of 2022, the Dutch government announced the creation of a 200 million euro fund for initiatives related to slave labor in Dutch colonies. In the same sense, after two decades of strong protests and tough legal battles, the Canadian authorities agreed, in April 2023, to compensate local indigenous communities with 600 million dollars. Regarding requests for heritage restitution, some of them were successful, as evidenced by the returns of other fragments of the Parthenon by the Vatican and Italy.