Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley and other dignitaries attend a wreath-laying event at the Christiansborg Castle, a former slave post, during a high-level consultative conference on the next steps to the landmark United Nations resolution on the trafficking of enslaved Africans, in Accra, Ghana, June 19, 2026. Image @ REUTERS/Francis Kokoroko
On the grounds of Christiansborg Castle, a 17th-century fortress on Ghana’s Atlantic coast once used to hold enslaved Africans before they were shipped across the ocean, African and Caribbean leaders gathered Friday for a wreath-laying ceremony that capped a three-day conference and a newly unified push for reparations. By the time the gathering closed, delegates had endorsed a 19-point plan demanding formal apologies, debt relief and financial compensation from countries that profited from transatlantic slavery.
The plan, adopted jointly by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Commission on Reparatory Justice, does not single out which nations should apologise. It calls instead for a Global Reparations Fund, sweeping debt relief and cancellation for affected countries, and reforms to international financial institutions to give the Global South fairer representation. It further demands the restitution of looted cultural property and ancestral remains, financing for climate justice, and dedicated measures addressing the specific brutalities inflicted on African women and girls during slavery, alongside calls for African states to offer diaspora Africans a right of return and pathways to citizenship, and to preserve coastal forts and castles like Christiansborg as memorials.
The Accra conference, held June 17–19, marked the formal merger of two reparations frameworks that had developed on separate tracks: CARICOM’s long-standing reparations plan and the African Union’s own parallel effort. The two bodies folded their work into a single document to be carried to the next UN General Assembly, building on the Addis Ababa Declaration that African and Caribbean leaders signed at their Second Africa-CARICOM Summit in September 2025. The gathering also doubled as the launch of the African Union’s “Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations,” a ten-year push running from 2026 to 2036.
Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, had billed the conference beforehand as one of the most consequential international meetings on reparatory justice in recent history. Organisers also used the gathering to establish three new bodies meant to carry the agenda forward: a reparatory justice advisory panel, a cultural restitution expert panel, and a legal panel focused specifically on reparations claims.
The momentum traces back to a UN resolution passed in March, which recognised transatlantic slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity.” That measure, formally Resolution A/RES/80/250, passed with 123 votes in favour, but the United States, Israel and 52 other countries, including European Union member states and Britain, either voted against it or abstained. Both the EU and the US argued at the time that the resolution risked implying a hierarchy among crimes against humanity, treating some as graver than others. Historians estimate that at least 12.5 million Africans were forcibly kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic by European ships between the 15th and 19th centuries, and advocates argue the legacy of that trade, entrenched racism and economic inequality, still demands redress today.
Heads of state from Namibia, Liberia, Senegal, Sao Tome and Principe and Barbados attended the conference, with Barbados represented by Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, alongside Equatorial Guinea’s vice president. Several leaders struck a conciliatory note in their remarks. Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama told delegates: “None of us gathered in this hall today can be held personally responsible for the atrocities of the transatlantic slave trade. History does not ask us to inherit guilt, but it asks us to inherit responsibility.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, addressing the conference virtually from the Elysee Palace, said enslaved people “were torn from their homelands, deported, dehumanised, and treated as goods,” while cautioning that reparations should not be treated “as an end point, or a cheque written to bring the story to a close.” His remarks followed a vote last month by French lawmakers to formally repeal slavery-era laws that had defined enslaved people’s legal status as “movable property” and sanctioned abuse and corporal punishment against them, though those lawmakers stopped short of endorsing reparations demands.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah