The long struggle for reparatory justice for the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of African people is entering an important new phase. What for decades was too often treated as a Caribbean demand, an African grievance, or an issue confined to history is increasingly becoming a coordinated international movement. CARICOM, through the CARICOM Reparations Commission and its newly revised Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, is helping to provide that movement with greater structure, purpose and global reach.
Carib News welcomes this development. The revised CARICOM plan, described as A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment, comes at a moment when cooperation between the Caribbean and Africa has reached a new level. The partnership between CARICOM and the African Union is no longer simply an expression of cultural solidarity. It is developing into an organized diplomatic, political, and institutional alliance around reparatory justice. The 2025 Africa-CARICOM Summit adopted the Addis Ababa Declaration establishing a framework for transcontinental cooperation on reparations, while the African Union has designated 2026–2035 as its Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations.
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Ghana has assumed a particularly important leadership role. President John Dramani Mahama, serving as the African Union’s champion for reparatory justice, helped carry the issue directly to the United Nations. On March 25, 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted a Ghana-led resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans to constitute “the gravest crime against humanity.” The resolution received 123 votes in favor, with three against and 52 abstentions. That declaration represents a significant international acknowledgment of both the magnitude of the crime and its enduring consequences.
This growing Africa-Caribbean partnership therefore offers something that has too often been missing from the reparations campaign: the possibility of operating from a broad global platform. It provides an opportunity to engage the United Nations and its human-rights institutions more systematically, while building alliances throughout Latin America, the African diaspora and other regions affected by slavery and colonialism. CARICOM has already pointed to cooperation with the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination as important parts of this expanding effort.
There is also an opportunity to deepen the discussion within the Commonwealth. At the 2024 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Samoa, leaders formally acknowledged calls for reparatory justice and agreed that the time had come for a “meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation” about slavery, colonialism and their continuing effects. That commitment does not settle the reparations question, nor does it resolve the substantial disagreements that remain among Commonwealth governments, but it provides an institutional opening that Caribbean and African governments can continue to pursue.
For Carib News, one of the most important dimensions of this emerging movement must be the African and Caribbean diaspora. The diaspora cannot remain on the sidelines of a matter so fundamentally connected to its own history and contemporary experience. Caribbean and African-descended communities in the United States, Britain, Canada, Europe and elsewhere possess political influence, intellectual resources, institutional networks and economic power that can contribute significantly to the international discussion on reparatory justice.
The late Professor Rex Nettleford frequently challenged conventional ideas about the so-called “Third World” by speaking instead of the “Two Thirds World.” His language carried an important message: Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia and their diasporas should not automatically think of themselves as marginal minorities in the international community. They constitute an enormous proportion of humanity. Nettleford urged that this Two Thirds World engage both itself and the dominant One Third in shaping the international order.
That perspective has particular relevance to reparatory justice. A movement connecting Africa, the Caribbean and their global diasporas possesses demographic, diplomatic, cultural and moral weight. Unity does not eliminate differences among nations or communities, but it can create a more consequential international voice.
The case for reparatory justice is also based on the argument that the consequences of enslavement did not disappear with emancipation. CARICOM and the African Union contend that slavery and colonialism produced economic, social and institutional structures whose effects continue to influence patterns of wealth, development, racial discrimination and inequality. CARICOM has consequently insisted that reparations should be understood not simply as a question of financial payment but as a broader program involving acknowledgment, development, education, health, cultural restoration and institutional repair. CARICOM Secretary-General Dr. Carla Barnett has summarized that approach as “justice plus development,” rather than charity.
The movement has therefore reached a point at which moral argument must increasingly be accompanied by research, international law, diplomacy, economic analysis and sustained institution-building. The African Union has already established expert and legal groups examining legal foundations, financial and economic questions, global governance, cultural issues and possible forms of repair. Such work can help move the international discussion from general declarations toward specific proposals that governments and institutions can examine and negotiate.
Carib News has long regarded the struggle for reparatory justice as inseparable from the larger struggle for dignity, equality and historical truth. We therefore view the growing partnership among CARICOM, the African Union, Ghana, international organizations and the global African diaspora as a significant development.
The history cannot be changed. But societies can determine how they confront its consequences.
The descendants of those who endured enslavement inherited a world profoundly shaped by that system, just as nations and institutions inherited advantages and structures produced during the same historical period. The growing international reparations movement is asking the world to confront that history not merely through remembrance, but through a serious examination of responsibility, repair and the conditions required for a more equitable future.
CARICOM has now placed a clearer manifesto before the world. Africa is increasingly standing with the Caribbean. The diaspora has an important role to play. International institutions are being engaged. The question of reparatory justice is moving from the margins toward the center of global discussion.
Carib News intends to remain engaged in that conversation and in the continuing examination of what genuine repair should mean.
It is about time.
