Source: (2013) UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal. 18:71-101.
Claims to reparations for historic injustice mark the modern global
landscape. Starting in the late 1980s, with the United States’ redress for
120,000 wrongly incarcerated American citizens and Japanese ancestry
during World War II, reparations advocates advanced claims on behalf of
African Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Holocaust
survivors in the United States; in support of colonized (and/or enslaved)
people in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Britain and the
Caribbean islands; in response to formerly repressive regimes in South
Africa, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, Korea, Brazil,
Nepal and Cambodia; in reaction to internal genocide in Sierra Leone, the
Congo and Rwanda; in challenge to specific wartime atrocities related to
Japan and Kosovo; and more. Those claims awakened public consciousness
about the horrors of historic injustice and the need for present-day redress.
They also generated controversy and legal and political backlash. Now,
often integrated into reconciliation or social healing initiatives, claims to
reparations are both significant and problematic. (author’s abstract)
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