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Portugal needs to “pay the costs” of slavery and other colonial-era crimes, the country’s president has said, in a rare instance of a European leader seemingly backing the need for reparations.
Portugal has long grappled with calls by campaigners to address its legacy as the European country with the longest historical involvement in the slave trade. During the span of four centuries, nearly 6 million Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported across the Atlantic by Portuguese vessels.
Those who managed to survive the voyage were enslaved and forced to toil on plantations in the Americas, mostly in Brazil, while Portugal and its institutions profited from their labour.
The country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said at an event with foreign journalists on Tuesday that Portugal “takes full responsibility” for the wrongs of the past and that those crimes, including colonial massacres, had “costs”.
“We have to pay the costs,” he said. “Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there goods that were looted and not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.”
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Wow, that’s amazing to hear from a head of state.
I 100% support my tax dollars going toward reparations here in the US, but can’t imagine how policy will be defined in order to give justice to people affected.
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The country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said at an event with foreign journalists on Tuesday that Portugal “takes full responsibility” for the wrongs of the past and that those crimes, including colonial massacres, had “costs”.
The remarks came one year after Rebelo de Sousa said Portugal should apologise and “assume responsibility” for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, though he stopped short of providing any concrete details or a full apology.
In both instances, the president’s remarks were made primarily to international audiences, said Paula Cardoso, the founder of the Afrolink online platform for Black professionals in Portugal.
She agreed on the need for reparations, arguing that Portugal must pay the costs of “being the creator of the transatlantic slave trade, of a culture of dehumanisation of Black bodies”.
The Portuguese president’s remarks come after the United Nations human rights chief added his voice to the African and Caribbean countries calling for amends to be made over slavery and colonisation.
“On reparations, we must finally enter a new era,” the high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said last week at a UN forum on people of African descent.
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