France Opens Inquiry into Haiti Links Amid Calls for Reparations

Emmanuel Macron has announced a joint commission to examine France and Haiti's shared past as activists demanded the return of billions of dollars of "ransom" money.

- Natricia Duncan

Their renewed calls for reparations come on the bicentenary of an agreement for the Caribbean island to pay 150m francs to France to compensate slave-owning colonists after independence.

"That decision put a price on the liberty of a young nation, which from its birth thereby confronted the unjust force of history," the French president said.

Though the figure was later reduced to 90m, Fritz Deshommes, the president of the Haitian National Committee on Restitution and Reparations (HNCRR), estimates the payment today could be worth between £29bn and £102bn.

The exact sum would depend on how it was calculated and whether lost customs revenue and economic stagnation were included.

Macron said the commission would undertake the "necessary and indispensable" work of examining all aspects of Haiti's and France's shared history and "propose recommendations to both governments to draw lessons from it and build a more peaceful future".

Once France's most important colony in the Caribbean, Haiti received hundreds of thousands of Africans who had been kidnapped, forcibly transported across the Atlantic and sold into slavery.