This is the sixth article in the series ‘Law and Justice: A Journey through History’. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.Rule of law is the bedrock of any modern society. It ensures equality of all before the law. Through notions of justice, punitive mechanisms, and multiple avenues of enforcement, law shapes social relationships and also in turn gets reconstituted and challenged by actors and contexts. In these moments law takes on another attribute – that of virtue. As we explore the troubled relationship between law, justice and society in the following essays, we will note how law struggles to negotiate a delicate balance between its punitive trait and as a messiah for justice. The essays in this series will uncover some fascinating aspects of law by turning to the archives of law. This will help uncover the commonalities between history, legal history, and socio- legal studies and also foster greater dialogue between historians and lawyers in South Asia.The essays for this special series will be curated by Dr Nitin Sinha (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, ZMO Berlin), Dr Sukhalata Sen (Former Assistant Professor, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru) and Vidhya Raveendranathan (Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen).On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly passed a motion which recognised the transatlantic slave trade as one of the “gravest crimes against humanity”. The proposal was first moved by Ghana, other nations of the African Union, and the Caribbean Community. It was accompanied by a demand for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.” The proposal claimed that years of servitude had not only hollowed out generations and resources from African countries and the Caribbean islands, but also created structural inequalities in these regions. While the proposal was passed by 123 nations, 52 (including the United Kingdom and European Union) abstained from voting, and three (United States of America, Israel and Argentina) voted against it .Unsurprisingly, the voting patterns revealed countries which abstained or voted against were former colonial powers which had profited from slavery. Curiously, these countries couched their opposition behind international laws. The US emphatically stated that such calls for reparations were unjust as the business of slavery was legal according to the laws of the time. Even if reparations were granted, the US insisted that it was unclear who the recipients would be. Nations like the UK have long rejected calls to reparations for colonial injustices.Recently, it has brought out some ugly remarks from Reform UK member Zia Yusuf, who announced that “the bank is closed and the door is locked” for those who “use history as a weapon to drain our treasury”. As if in anticipation of such rhetoric, Ghana’s foreign minister insisted, “We are demanding compensation – let us be clear, African leaders are not asking for money. We want justice for victims and causes to be supported, educational and endowment funds, skills and training.” In fact, UK’s apprehensions come in the wake of a report submitted in 2023 which had concluded that they alone should pay USD 24 trillion as reparations to 14 countries.But is retrospective justice as unthinkable in law as claimed by the US and UK? To what extent is the charge of such weaponisation itself a denial of the crime? Why are reparation and blackmail associated together? For instance, Germany, in 2015, admitted to committing genocide in Namibia in 1904 and paid out a financial package of 1.1 billion euros as a ‘development fund’ in 2021 without using the term ‘reparation’. What role does history play in the production of narratives of justice? What happens when moralities of the past and the present collide with that of the law? Let us consider the complex interplay of time and law in international law to assess whether such demands for compensation are justified by former colonies. The following sections analyse the location of inter-temporal law as the common recourse to meet past injustices, the interaction of time within this law and the limitations of such laws on reparation.Inter-temporal law and its dilemmasBetween 1500 and 1700, enslaved Africans worked and died across the Caribbeans, Brazil, and the New World. In fact, such capitalistic societies were defined by slave labour and its exploitation. In many regions, Africans and people of African descent continued to live in slave-like conditions long after the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. The Haitian Revolution, one of the few sparks of resistance, was subdued under the weight of the glory of European history and all but lost except in local histories of tourism and non-European regional histories. The common response to such past injustices is a quick retreat to inter-temporal law in international law as a defence mechanism. Established in 1928, inter-temporal law mandated that legal rights, rules and acts be evaluated in accordance with the laws of the time. Today, it is often invoked to resolve disputes over historical sovereignty and rights, which are primarily governed by the law in force at the time, while also allowing for subsequent developments in the law. It further prohibits the retroactive application of obligations on completed legal acts. With slavery abolished by the British Empire in 1843, it is treated as a completed legal act, insulating it from retroactive obligations. Therefore, USA and UK’s refusal to grant reparations can be presented as an adherence to inter-temporal law. Yet, inter-temporal law hides within itself multiple pulls – between legal stability and legal development, and between static and the evolutionary interpretation of the law. The absence of a universal international law in the 19th century and its Eurocentric bias call for an evolutionary approach to inter-temporal law rather than treating it as fixed and frozen in time. In fact, this bias is evident in the reparation laws of the time, as seen in the Haitian Revolution, where, in a cruel twist of law, Haitians were compelled to compensate former French plantation owners for the loss of property under the prevailing laws.General Toussaint Louverture: Haitian hero. Photo: By arrangementRecent legal scholarship has grappled with such inherent dilemmas present in the inter-temporal doctrine by paying greater attention to history. They call for breaking from the Eurocentric foundations of international law by recognising the plurality of legal orders beyond the European framework. Inter-temporal law should use history to reconstruct these regional systems, trace their shifts, and attend to their mutations within oral traditions, in order to recover suppressed forms of legal subjectivity and statehood. This is by no means an easy task, even for the most gifted scholar, and requires collaboration between lawyers and historians. For it foregrounds crucial problems – first, how to delineate the legal and the social in such societies, where both functioned as forms of political language; and second, whether legal proceedings, with its Eurocentric or dominant-tribe bias, are at all the appropriate tools for such analysis. Nevertheless, these revisionist turns in inter-temporal discourse suggest that history can be applied as both a constructive and dynamic element in framing and updating legal principles.The entanglement of law and time in justiceLet us look at the calibration of time itself in legal disputes. According to Bruce Ackerman, the very idea of justice is determined by the way time is framed within different conceptions of corrective, relational and distributive justice. In corrective justice, time is bunched together in short (hourly) intervals, with the sole purpose of assigning responsibility for the crime or injustice committed. Relational justice extends across longer durations, situating the harm in relation to other members of society and seeking to restore dignity to the aggrieved party. Distributive justice adopts a more expansive, autobiographical temporality tied to the life of the individual bringing the claim. It assumes that, ceteris paribus (all resources distributed equally), individuals would have enjoyed full freedom. It aims to restore what was previously denied and reopen possibilities for such freedom. Ackerman cautions, however, that ‘framing paradoxes’ may arise where these temporalities conflict, producing divergent and even contradictory diagnoses of the same case.Also read: From the British Era to Now, Police Brutalities Have Focused Most on Marginalised GroupsIf we consider the problem of reparations within this frame, then the conflict of justice emerges between two temporalities – relational and distributive justice. While both seek to render meaning to lives, they strive towards different kinds of meaning. Relational justice requires that the African and Caribbean societies be understood in relation to their contributions to capitalism of the time and the wealth of colonial nations. Distributive justice, by contrast, seeks to recognise their self-identification as being deprived and historically shackled to peoples across generations. The US and UK are more likely to view the problem through the lens of relational justice. However, if the matter is adjudged through relational justice, the focus on relationships and historical contexts can lead to troubling outcomes. It may lead to the brutalities of slavery being weighed against the legitimacy and benefits of the capitalist systems, which could dilute claims for justice. In this sense, relational justice entrenches inter-temporal law in legal stasis. On the other hand, the African and Caribbean communities would likely pursue reparations as a form of distributive justice, which I argue, would be an evolution of the inter temporal law, by locating it within the freedom and well-being of humanity. Here, inter-temporal law moves beyond the constraints of completed legal acts or accusations of weaponisation of the past and establishes a right to self-determination and freedom. However, the laws enforced by the international legal community ultimately rest on its conception of inter-temporal law — whether toward legal development or legal stasis.Slave sale receipt, Louisiana, 1864. Photo: By arrangementThe limits of reparative justiceOne thing is certain in these conversations of reparation, restitution and justice: law must constantly negotiate with time – both in its continuity and its disruptions. Considering the tensions within inter-temporal law, one cannot but wonder how far the justice of reparations is a double-edged sword. Does the admission of historical guilt and the targeted funding of education and infrastructure in former colonies achieve genuine liberation, or merely lay newer foundations for neo-feudal relations, echoing the colonial strategy of ‘dominance without hegemony’? One might even ask whether the allocation of resources for development compels former colonies to continually ‘grow up’ according to Western standards, while granting the former coloniser an intrinsic advantage in legitimacy.Further, one may wonder to what extent such revisions of Eurocentricism within inter-temporal law can stave off claims of ethnic supremacy and projects of correcting history in former colonies. Taking India, for instance, anti-colonial sentiment has been weaponised through a rigid enforcement of Hindu might under the guise of redressal for past injustice. The recent use of law to expand the presence of right-wing ideology through the dilution of histories, demolition of monuments, and disenfranchisement of citizens has merely replaced one form of violence with another.Therefore, unless history is meaningfully engaged to break the Eurocentric rationalities of international law and to accommodate plural legal norms in resolving questions of legal subjectivity and state autonomy while avoiding the descent into ethnic majoritarianism, one is left unsure as to the efficacy of justice for those spirits which continue to haunt this discussion.