African and Caribbean leaders are calling for financial reparations, debt forgiveness and official apologies from nations that profited from the transatlantic slave trade, following the adoption of an expansive reparations agenda at a conference in Ghana.
The 19-point plan includes demands for monetary compensation, debt relief, the creation of a Global Reparations Fund, and the repatriation of stolen cultural treasures and ancestral remains. It also urges changes to international financial institutions, which advocates argue have long placed developing nations at a disadvantage.
African and Caribbean countries are expected to bring the proposal before the next UN General Assembly as they intensify a joint campaign for reparations linked to slavery.
The framework was approved Friday by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparatory Justice, closing a three-day gathering focused on the issue.
Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama and other officials attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana, on Friday during a high-level conference tied to a United Nations resolution on the trafficking of enslaved Africans. (Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images)
“None of us gathered in this hall today can be held personally responsible for the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade,” Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama told delegates.
“History does not ask us to inherit guilt, but it asks us to inherit responsibility,” Mahama added.
The document does not name which countries would be expected to pay compensation or offer formal apologies.
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John Dramani Mahama, president of Ghana, lays a wreath at Christiansborg Castle in Accra during a high-level conference on the United Nations resolution addressing the trafficking of enslaved Africans on Friday. (Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images)
It does call for debt cancellation, climate justice financing, expanded citizenship pathways for Africans in the diaspora and what organizers describe as a “right of return” for descendants of enslaved Africans.
The plan also urges African countries to preserve former slave forts and castles as memorial sites.
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According to advocates, at least 12.5 million Africans were kidnapped and transported aboard European ships between the 15th and 19th centuries. Supporters of reparations argue the effects of slavery continue to be felt across Africa and the Caribbean generations later.
President John Dramani Mahama and Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa host a high-level consultative conference on the next steps following the United Nations resolution on trafficking of enslaved Africans in Accra, Ghana, on Thursday. (Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images)
The conference follows a UN vote in March recognizing transatlantic slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity.”
The resolution passed with 123 votes in favor, but the U.S., Israel and 52 other countries either voted against it or abstained.
According to Reuters, the United States and European Union raised concerns that the resolution could be interpreted as creating a hierarchy among crimes against humanity by treating some atrocities as more serious than others.
John Dramani Mahama, president of Ghana, Mia Amor Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, and Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s foreign affairs minister, attend a wreath-laying event at Christiansborg Castle in Accra, Ghana, Friday, during a high-level conference on the United Nations resolution addressing the trafficking of enslaved Africans. (Ernest Ankomah/Getty Images)
Heads of state from Namibia, Liberia, Senegal, Barbados and Sao Tome and Principe attended the conference, along with senior officials from several other countries.
French President Emmanuel Macron addressed the gathering virtually from the Élysée Palace, where he acknowledged the suffering caused by slavery.
Enslaved people were “torn from their homelands, deported, dehumanised, and treated as goods,” Macron said.
Macron also said reparations should not be viewed “as an end point, or a cheque written to bring the story to a close.”
The conference in Ghana brought together separate reparations efforts previously pursued by African and Caribbean nations into a single document that organizers plan to take before the United Nations.
