PARAMARIBO, Suriname (AP) - A Jamaican lawyer who lost a slavery reparations lawsuit against Britain's Queen Elizabeth II said Monday he would take the case to the United States.

Miguel Lorne lost a case in 2002 in Jamaica's High Court because he couldn't prove that the island's blacks were direct descendants of enslaved Africans.

Lorne said he now has new DNA evidence to approach the courts again, speaking at a racism conference in Suriname.
"We lost the case against the Queen and her descendants because the court ruled that we could not prove we are related," Lorne said. "But the evidence from this conference would help."

Surinamese Dr John Codrington presented new DNA findings at the conference, which he said shows that millions of blacks in the United States, Africa and the Caribbean have the same DNA markers and are directly related.

Lorne said the new information has given him and others the ammunition needed to refile suits in international courts.

Codrington, who studied blood diseases and DNA technology in the United States, presented a study showing blacks in Suriname, the United States and parts of West Africa and Ethiopia had the same type 17, 19 and 20 sickle cell markers.

Lorne said the case against the Queen would be refiled in August in US courts using laws allowing litigants to file claims against countries and corporations for acts committed outside the United States. He said Jewish groups won millions in reparations from Germany in US courts after the Holocaust, and black groups plan to do the same.

Lorne also said he plans to sue for billions of US dollars in reparations, including land claims.

The six-day conference in Suriname, which runs through Wednesday, has brought together more than 100 delegates from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and Africa.

The Global African Conference was created during a 2002 meeting in Barbados and billed as a follow-up to the 2001 UN anti-racism conference in South Africa.

It has been preparing to bring lawsuits against Britain, Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands for their role in the slave trade.

As in Barbados two years ago, organisers decided to keep non-blacks from participating in some meetings, saying issues like slavery were too painful to discuss in front of non-blacks.

In 2002, several delegations walked out to protest the decision.

Only one non-black, a Surinamese of Indian descent, asked to be let into the conference Saturday and was allowed in.
Another issue being discussed at the conference was the AIDS/HIV epidemic in Africa, and the possibility of Cuba sending doctors to help.

A team of doctors held talks in recent days with Cuban health officials, conference organisers said. Zimbabwe has been proposed as a base for the programme but funds still need to be raised.

On Sunday, delegates also debated the wording of a document intended to sum up past abuses of blacks and problems facing them today.

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