Letter: Reparation and apology is price UK must pay for colonial sins

Joseph Cotterill’s article “Namibia divided about accepting Germany’s offer of reparations for colonial atrocities” (Report, April 30) draws attention to some of the difficulties that confront those former imperial powers that seek to reckon with their past. But his observation that Germany is the only nation to have “made a payment to a former colony” is possibly misleading. William Hague, when UK foreign secretary, made a statement in parliament in June 2013 in which he said that the British government recognised that many Kenyans were severely tortured during the state of emergency in Kenya during the 1950s.

In conjunction with that statement, approximately £20mn was paid to about 5,000 Kenyan victims. While the term “reparations” was not used, the payments made were in effect “reparations”, though Hague’s statement was in the context of a settlement of a legal suit brought by a small number of Kenyans who alleged torture at the hands of the security forces in Kenya. I was one of the lawyers who represented over 20,000 Kenyans in subsequent group litigation in the High Court in London which culminated in 2018. These claimants were not part of the earlier litigation. The government did not settle on this occasion, and the then foreign secretary — our current prime minister — issued no apology.

The judge found that the case was time-barred under the Limitation Act. Consequently, the claim failed and the claimants, whose accounts of abuses were supported by historical documentation, have not been compensated. That is no criticism of the judge, who simply applied the law. But the fact is Britain has not fully faced up to its colonial past and no proper mechanism has been devised to compensate those who suffered.

Hague “expressed regret”, but this was somewhat mealy-mouthed because, most notably, it stopped short of an outright apology. I agree with Cotterill, these issues are not easy, but the starting point is a fulsome acknowledgment of what happened, and a serious wish to address it.

Bryan Cox QC
Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK