UK Cannot Escape Colonial-Era Liability, Legal Expert Argues

In a panel discussion at the University of Lagos, Dr. Asikia Karibi-Whyte, a legal scholar specializing in jurisprudence and international law, directly challenged one of the United Kingdom's most persistent defenses against colonial reparations claims: that current governments cannot be held liable for the actions of their predecessors. The argument, she said, collapses under the weight of international law itself.

The occasion was the launch of a new research report titled CO2lonialism, Ecocide and Reparations, which examines the ecological consequences of colonial rule across Africa. The timing and venue—a major African university, with scholars from across the continent—signaled that this was not a marginal academic exercise. The report's central claim is straightforward but expansive: the environmental destruction wrought by colonial economic systems should be quantified, valued, and incorporated into formal reparations claims against the former colonial powers.

Dr. Karibi-Whyte's core legal argument rests on a principle that international law has long recognized: a state does not change its fundamental identity when its government changes. The United Kingdom, in the eyes of international law, is the same legal entity today that it was during the height of empire. Governments come and go; administrations shift; but the state persists. This continuity of state identity, she argued, means that Britain cannot simply shed responsibility for colonial-era wrongs by pointing to the passage of time or the turnover of political leadership. The state that extracted resources, disrupted ecosystems, and impoverished colonies is the same state that exists now.

To ground this argument in precedent, Dr. Karibi-Whyte pointed to the "Certain Phosphate Lands in Nauru" case before the International Court of Justice. That proceeding established that environmental damage inflicted during colonial administration—in that case, the devastation caused by phosphate mining—can become the subject of an international legal claim. The case demonstrated that courts recognize environmental harm as a legitimate basis for state liability, even when the damage occurred decades earlier under different political leadership.

The report itself, led by Professor J. G. Nkem Onyekpe, attempts to quantify what that liability might look like. Using a 2022 peer-reviewed estimate, the authors note that resources appropriated from the Global South through unequal economic exchange were valued at more than $10 trillion in 2015 alone. When that analytical framework is extended across the full span of colonial rule and applied to African states, the potential scale of environmental reparations claims reaches into the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Professor Nnagugwu Oscar Uluocha, a geographer at the University of Lagos, characterized the ecological damage inflicted on Nigeria under British colonial rule as "colossal"—a word that carries weight when spoken by someone who studies the land itself.

The report is not merely an academic exercise. It is being prepared for submission to the African Union's Committee of Experts on Reparations and Legal Reference Group on Reparations. The intention is to help African nations develop a coordinated, unified approach to claiming environmental damages from their former colonial rulers. This represents a shift in how reparations are being framed and pursued—moving beyond the historical injustices of slavery, forced labor, and resource extraction to include the systematic degradation of ecosystems that continues to shape African economies and environments today.

What makes this argument significant is that it does not ask the United Kingdom to accept a new principle of international law. It asks the UK to accept that the principles already embedded in international law apply to it. The state is continuous. The damage was real. The law recognizes both. What remains is the question of whether Britain will.