A Legal History of International Reparations

Abstract

We have witnessed an increasing interest in reparations over the past decade, an interest derived from episodes both domestic and international, ranging historically from the legacy of slavery in the United States to events occurring these past ten years in Iraq and the Horn of Africa.1 One principal event, which not only generated most of the reparations activities and discourse of the past half-century but which has also been the subject of much of the litigation and negotiations of the most recent period, is the German payment of reparations arising out of World War II atrocities. 2 German reparations have also been at the center of the single most critical and controversial evolution of public international law in the past century; namely, the movement from state-centered to societaland individual-centered rights and obligations. This evolution has its substantive focus in the field of international human rights, and its procedural focus in the increasingly contested primacy of state reparations over direct individual claims for compensation and restitution. Both issues arose in and are illuminated by the history of German reparations and compensation or restitution payments.