When British public lawyers proclaim Magna Carta's influence in Britain's colonies around the world, they generally do so, even if obliquely, as a way of reconciling Britain's colonial past with its liberal-democratic and multicultural present. A narrative is thus constructed in which Magna Carta is presented as a symbol of a tradition of ‘English liberty’, which Englishmen took with them when they went abroad to settle these colonies and which endures to this day. English liberty, thus conceived, includes the right to personal liberty, the right to personal security, freedom from imprisonment without just cause, and the free use and enjoyment and disposal of all property. To this list could be added the right to representative government.

In this chapter, I wish to challenge the foregoing account of a tradition of English liberty, as symbolised by Magna Carta, which England bequeathed to its former colonies, insofar as it relates to the so-called ‘sugar colonies’ of the Commonwealth Caribbean. In particular, I wish to argue that the version of English liberty that was exported to the West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the first English settlers is not adequate to the task of reconciling Britain's colonial past with modern conceptions of democracy or multiculturalism. More than this, I wish to argue that the legacy of English liberty in the Commonwealth Caribbean is no mere matter of historical interest, but continues to be deeply problematic because of its lingering influence on contemporary human rights jurisprudence in the region.

I will begin by linking the transmission of Magna Carta, and the other bundle of rights associated with the concept of English liberty, to the arrival of the first settlers in the region who were determined to claim English liberty as part of their ‘colonial birthright’ as Englishmen. I will proceed to examine how these settlers succeeded in claiming the rights and privileges associated with English liberty for themselves while at the same time denying these rights and privileges to the West Africans transported to the region to work as slaves on their sugar plantations, who were subject to a set of brutal and oppressive Slave Code laws.