Jamaica will present a landmark slavery reparations petition to King Charles, seeking to address historical crimes that its culture minister says still disadvantage former British colonies, including the Caribbean nation.

The petition will be submitted to Charles, Jamaica’s head of state, on Monday.

“We are a resilient people. We were able to recover from [Hurricane] Melissa, for example,” said Olivia Grange, who arrived in London at the weekend with members of Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations.

“But there is still much work to do. Imagine how much more we could have achieved without the inherited problems and legacy of slavery,” she told the Guardian.

First announced in June last year, the petition asks the monarch to use his authority to seek legal advice from the judicial committee of the London-based Privy Council, the final court of appeal for UK overseas territories and some Commonwealth countries.

It asks Charles to determine whether the forced transport of Africans to Jamaica was lawful, whether it amounted to a crime against humanity, and whether Britain must provide restitution for slavery and its lasting consequences.

Grange said these questions, and the Privy Council’s response, are essential to advancing Jamaica’s reparations claims.

Between the 15th and 19th centuries, more than 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped, forcibly transported to the Americas, and sold into slavery.

Grange said Jamaica was the first Caribbean nation to establish a national reparations mechanism, created in 2009. Its aim, she said, is to address slavery’s lasting effects, which have left countries such as Jamaica at a severe economic disadvantage and limited their ability to respond to modern Caribbean challenges, including the climate crisis.

“We have inherited systems that continue to deprive our country and our people — in education, health, and even diet, shaped by what our ancestors were fed,” she said.

Ralph Gonsalves, a former prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines who helped establish the Caribbean Community Reparations Commission, echoed Grange’s views.

“The present is deeply shaped by the past, because today’s underdevelopment stems, as we see it, from native genocide and the enslavement of African people,” he said on Sunday.

“People must remember this: European nations were enriched through the enslavement of African people.” Gonsalves is an elder and adviser for the Repair Campaign, a social movement for reparatory justice.

He described Jamaica’s visit as a critical milestone among several upcoming events, including a Caribbean reparations conference in Barbados later this month, planned advocacy at the UN general assembly in late September, and the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Antigua in November, which King Charles is scheduled to attend.

Global calls are growing for Britain and other former colonial powers to recognise centuries of transatlantic slavery, which treated African people as property, as a crime and to engage in reparatory justice.

Please note: This is an edited version of an article from The Guardian website.