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The United Kingdom has rejected Jamaica’s calls for slavery reparations, hours before a Jamaican delegation delivered a petition to Buckingham Palace.

Getting into it: In a statement, the UK Government said, “Our position on reparations is clear: the UK does not and will not make reparations. The transatlantic slave trade was abhorrent and of course it’s right that we acknowledge the wrongs of the past, but we’ll continue to face forward and work with other countries on our current shared challenges.”

This came after Jamaica’s Ministry of Culture announced Sunday that a government delegation was traveling to London to file the petition. The petition puts three questions before King Charles III (Jamaica’s head of state) and asks him to refer them to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the London court that Jamaica and several other Commonwealth states still use as their last stop on appeal. The questions ask whether shipping African people to Jamaica against their will and holding them there in bondage broke English common law, whether doing so amounted to crimes against humanity the UK has to answer for, and whether the UK owes the Jamaican people redress for it. The delegation is seeking $10 billion and says no Commonwealth country has tried this route before.

Culture Minister Olivia Grange, who led the delegation, framed the filing as the opening move rather than the endgame. “In relation to the wrongs that were done, we want answers,” she told the Associated Press. “Once we get those answers, then our attorneys, our lawyers, will determine what the next move is.” She also met with British Museum officials about returning colonial-era artifacts, and said she came away encouraged despite the rejection.

The timing was deliberate. The petition was filed on the anniversary of the 1781 departure of the Liverpool-registered ship Zong from West Africa with 442 enslaved Africans aboard. The ship ran out of supplies on its way to Jamaica, and the crew threw 132 men, women and children overboard after calculating that an insurance claim on lost property would pay better than selling sick and dehydrated captives at a discount.

This all follows a UN committee’s conclusion last month that states have a legal duty to consider reparations.