King Charles Won’t Meet Jamaican Officials Over £7.6BILLION Slavery Reparations

King Charles III will not personally receive a petition from Jamaica as its government steps up a campaign for Britain to pay £7.6billion in slavery reparations.

The Jamaican delegation has arrived in London with a petition for Buckingham Palace as it attempts to lobby the monarch for a massive payout by UK taxpayers.

Royal observers had initially expected the petition to be given to Charles as Jamaica’s head of state, asking him to put three questions to the Privy Council.

But Buckingham Palace has now told the Daily Mail this will not happen in person, with the King away in Scotland as he continues his annual summer break at Balmoral.

It comes as Jamaica hopes answers to questions in the petition, as well as talks with the Foreign Office, are steps towards a reparations payout by Britain.

The bid to entangle the King in the campaign focuses on how in 1833, after Britain led the world by banning slavery, it paid compensation to slave owners, not to slaves.

The £20million bill, amounting to 40 per cent of the Treasury’s annual income, meant Britain had to take out a huge loan, which was only paid off in 2015.

Jamaican culture minister Olivia Grange said on arrival in the UK: ‘Up to 2015, Britain was paying the slave masters because we were considered property.

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British governments have maintained they will not pay slavery reparations – and the Prime Minister’s spokesman reiterated this stance when asked about the matter today.

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It is understood that the King acts entirely on the advice of the relevant authorities in relation to the functions under section four of the Judicial Committee Act 1833, which relates to referral of a petition to the committee.

The monarch has no personal discretion in deciding whether to make a referral, and no role in any substantive consideration of a petition. He will instead act on the advice of the Government.

The correct process is that such petitions are delivered in hard copy to the registrar of the committee, while any official meeting held in relation to the petition would be with the King’s official representative, which in this case is the Governor General of Jamaica.

Buckingham Palace is thought to have been working closely with the Governor General to ensure the petition is correctly lodged and that the Jamaican government have all the necessary information for their visit.

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Jamaica’s petition is based on an 1833 law that made the committee the highest court for civil and criminal appeals in the British Empire.

When the Empire became the Commonwealth of independent nations after the Second World War, the committee retained that role for the countries that maintain their legal ties to the UK.

Mr Prescott expects the petition to be referred to the Judicial Committee, where a panel of UK Supreme Court justices will review it and make a ruling.

But he said the justices are usually very cautious about granting such petitions because they sidestep standard legal procedures.

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