Source: United Nations – Geneva

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination this afternoon held a half day of general discussion on reparations for the injustices from the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans, their treatment as chattel, and the ongoing harms to and crimes against people of African descent.  The half-day consisted of opening statements two panel discussions, hearing from Committee members, experts in international law, representative from the diplomatic corps, and political and civil society leaders.

Speaking in the first panel discussion on “Reparations and International Law: Legal Frameworks, Obligations and Enforcement” were Pela Boker-Wilson, Committee Expert; Joshua Castellino, Executive Dean, College of Arts, Law & Social Sciences, Brunel University of London; Patricia Sellers, former Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; Britta Redwood, Assistant Professor, Seton Hall School of Diplomacy and Seton Hall Law School; Adejoké Babington-Ashaye, former Investigator at the International Criminal Court; and Bernard Duhaime, Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence.

Speaking in the second panel discussion on “The Legacy of Chattel Slavery: Structural Racism and Institutional Accountability” were Tendayi Achiume, former Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; Matthew Anthony Wilson, Permanent Representative of Barbados to the United Nations Office at Geneva; Eric Phillips, Vice-Chairperson of the Caribbean Community’s Reparations Commission; Ibrahima Guissé, Committee Expert; and Dennis O’Brien, Founder of the Repair Campaign.

The programme of work and other documents related to the session can be found here.  Summaries of the public meetings of the Committee can be found here, while webcasts of the public meetings can be found here.

The Committee will next meet in public on Monday, 28 April at 3 p.m. to begin its consideration of the combined twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth periodic reports of Mauritius (CERD/C/MUS/24-25).

Opening Statements

MICHAL BALCERZAK, Committee Chairperson, welcomed participants to the half-day of general discussion to advance the development of a general recommendation on reparations for the historical injustices rooted in the chattel enslavement of Africans and the enduring harms experienced by people of African descent.  The proposed general recommendation sought to clarify the scope and content of the right to reparations under international human rights law and address the harms caused by the forced capture and transatlantic transport of Africans, their enslavement as chattel, and the lasting consequences of these crimes. 

To inform this process, the Committee had issued a public call for input on 14 February 2025 and had been encouraged by the engagement, with 56 submissions received from a wide range of stakeholders.  Today’s discussion provided a space to reflect on the submissions received, deepen the collective understanding of applicable international legal standards, and further examine the contemporary legacy of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.  In the coming months, the Committee would prepare a draft text of the general recommendation, which would be made publicly available for input from all stakeholders prior to finalisation. 

MAHAMANE CISSÉ-GOURO, Director, Human Rights Council and Treaty Mechanisms Division, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said today’s topic addressed a matter of deep historical significance and urgent contemporary relevance: reparatory justice for the injustices arising from the trade in enslaved Africans, their treatment as chattel, and the continuing harms and crimes suffered by people of African descent.  In 2001, at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, States adopted by consensus the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, which recognised slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity, and among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.  Contemporary structures and systems, such as racial profiling, police brutality, unequal access to education and employment, disparities in health and housing, and the denial of political participation and justice were rooted in these enduring harms.

International human rights law and political commitments by States provided a clear framework for attaining substantive racial justice and equality.  A central element of dismantling systemic racism was addressing the past and redressing its legacies through reparatory justice, to transform the present and secure a just and equitable future.  The High Commissioner had called for reparatory justice to transform structures and systems which were designed and shaped by enslavement, colonialism and successive racially discriminatory policies and systems. States and others that had benefited and continued to benefit from these legacies should make amends for centuries of violence and discrimination through wide-ranging and meaningful initiatives, including through formal apologies, truth-telling processes, and reparations in various forms.  This called for political leadership, and creative, effective and comprehensive responses to legacies of the past.  Since the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, the international community had taken important steps; however, as the Convention commemorated its sixtieth anniversary, it was evident that these commitments and recommendations had not resulted in durable, transformative change. 

The development of this general recommendation was timely and necessary.  It would clarify the scope and content of the right to reparations for historical injustices under international human rights law and provide States with guidance to fulfil their obligations under the Convention.  Mr. Cissé-Gouro encouraged all participants to engage and emphasised that the Office of the High Commissioner supported the process. 

GAY MCDOUGALL, Committee Vice-Chairperson, said this year marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Convention, which remained the normative centre of international efforts to end racism. In commemoration of the anniversary year, the Committee had decided to prepare a general recommendation on reparations to clarify and elaborate the legal obligations of States to repair the harms inflicted by the forced capture of Africans, the transatlantic transport of those captives, their enslavement as chattel, and the massive and continuing harms suffered by them and their descendants.  The transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans constituted the largest and most concentrated forced deportation of human beings ever recorded, implicating several regions of the world during more than four centuries. Between 12 to 13 million Africans were violently uprooted from Africa for sale and enslavement. 

The system of colonial rule had enabled and facilitated the development of the uniquely brutal system of chattel enslavement, and the resulting massive gross abuses of human rights that followed for centuries.  The transatlantic slave trade was inextricably tied to European colonial domination of Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and parts of Asia.  It was a system that enriched Europe, and the institutions in power, and it existed today in many contemporary forms.  Now it was widely agreed that all forms of slavery were violations of international law and most domestic laws gave rise to the responsibility to ensure reparations.  However, the harms inflicted by these events had never been addressed, including how they negatively impacted the economic, social, political, civic and cultural rights of countries around the world.   The Committee’s proposed general recommendation would provide guidance on the scope and content of the right to reparations under international human rights law. 

Panel Discussion One on Reparations and International Law: Legal Frameworks, Obligations and Enforcement

Opening Remarks by the Moderator of the Panel

PELA BOKER-WILSON, Committee Expert and Panel Moderator, said the chattel enslavement of Africans was a human rights violation, and victims had a right to reparations based on their right to a remedy.  At the same time, today the legacies of chattel enslavement could be seen in daily lives.  Chattel enslavement and its legacies were the foundation on which systematic racism permeated and the history which drove discriminatory laws and policies based on race. Several legal challenges remained which would be discussed during the panel. 

Summary of Remarks by the Panellists

Some speakers, among other things, noted that the trade in enslaved Africans began in the fifteenth century, when Portuguese traders established sugar plantations in the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, and São Tomé.  At the time, the justification for the enslaved status of African labourers was based on the notion that these labourers had been enslaved because they had been taken captive in just wars.  The slave trade was the reduction of a free person to the status of being enslaved, by whatever means, including kidnap, capture, transfer, or sale.  Slave trading comprised not only the initial transatlantic passages, but internal acts of trade in enslaved persons throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.  These two prongs of the slave trade, trans-Atlantic and internal or domestic slave trading, had occurred for centuries. 

One speaker said the photograph of a South African billionaire of European descent, arm raised in a Nazi salute, was perhaps the most apt icon for that particular civilization.  It epitomised success in generating wealth by extraction, disregarding surroundings in constructing systems where some had an inherent sense of entitlement to everything, even if it devastated others.  Another speaker said an immeasurable toll of sexual, reproductive and gendered practices and institutions had persisted throughout the hundreds of years of slavery and of slave trading in North and South America and in the Caribbean. 

A speaker underscored that the transatlantic chattel slavery had created and entrenched anti-Black racism. Although slavery had been abolished, the persistence of the social, psychological, and economic harms of racial discrimination persisted until today.  Another speaker noted that the racial hierarchy that was at the root of the slave trade and slavery had no foundation in international law at that time, just as it had no legitimacy under international law today.  One speaker said reparations for people of African descent were not only a matter of justice for the past, but also a foundation for a more equitable and peaceful future.

Reparations were vital in seeking justice for colonial crimes, but also to eliminate the root cause of historic and continuing colonial existence.  States must ensure that reparations were not merely symbolic, but concrete and enforceable, through judicial rulings as well as administrative or legislative reparation programmes.  These programmes could be supported by national or international funding and must be accessible, gender-sensitive, victim-centred, and rights-based.  In line with established standards, reparations needed to be comprehensive, encompassing restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition.  States should establish robust legal and institutional frameworks and ensure stable financial allocations that were protected from political or economic fluctuations.  Crucially, reparation measures must be proportional to the gravity of the harm and address the full scope of the violations.  It was also important to ensure that victims participated in the reparations process. 

Successful reparations had stemmed from attempts to seek victim-oriented justice. These included local revolutions achieving regime change and victims’ framing of legal arguments to hold power to account.  The dismissal of reparations as solely pertaining to the past needed to be confronted; reparations appeared to be about the past but they were also about the present.  Redress by reparations required recognition that sexual abuse was omnipresent in the lives of the enslaved.  The quest for reparations needed to be achieved through evidence-based reasoning. They had to be shaped to show how the few, irrespective of race, had benefitted from the exploitation of the many, irrespective of race. 

The Convention was a power instrument for redress.  Under article 11, States could bring complaints against other States for violations of the Convention.  Article 14 allowed individuals and groups to submit petitions directly to the Committee provided that the respondent State had recognised the Committee’s jurisdiction to receive individual petitions.  The Basic Principles on Reparations, a United Nations resolution from 2005, established five aspects of reparations that must follow a significant human rights violation, including the need to guarantee the non-recurrence of the human rights violation at issue. 

The Convention and subsequent jurisprudence of the Committee required material compensation and policy changes to address the legacy of transatlantic chattel slavery and the system of racial discrimination that was created to entrench it. 

Structural discrimination that arose from anti-Black racism was an ongoing human rights violation and needed to be addressed by States parties to the Convention.   The Committee was urged to recognise the gendered injustices intrinsic of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery and to include them as germane to the redress considered in the forthcoming general recommendation on reparations. 

Discussion 

Several speakers spoke from the floor. One speaker welcomed the Committee’s initiative to develop a general recommendation on reparations, which was a vital step towards accountability.  Reparations were grounded in international law, carrying legal consequences which could not be erased by time.  Another speaker said that at the minimum, States parties were required to provide reparations for their failure to eliminate the systemic racism and inequality arising from their inadequate remediation of chattel slavery and its legacies.  The Committee was urged to adopt a comprehensive and transformative approach to address both systemic racism and structural economic inequalities arising from chattel slavery and colonialism in the general recommendation.  A speaker said the time had come to move from rhetoric to concrete measures for reparations for historical and cultural monuments destroyed and looted during centuries of colonialism and slavery. One speaker said reparations were not a favour, but were moral and political obligations of States. 

Panel Discussion Two on the Legacy of Chattel Slavery: Structural Racism and Institutional Accountability

Summary of Remarks by the Panellists

Some speakers, among other things, commended the Committee for the draft general recommendation, which dealt with a vital issue and was long overdue.  The Committee should be applauded for its work and the call for input, and those who had answered the call were thanked.  The call for input document prepared by the Committee did an excellent job of highlighting the history, global responses and objectives, while pointing out the milestones along the way. 

Chattel slavery was the first global regime of State-legalised racial capitalism, speakers said.  The laws that built it had been dismantled in name, but never in consequence.  The transatlantic slave trade was not just a chapter in history, but was a crime against humanity.  Slavery had funded the economic development of colonial countries, particularly the industrial revolution, and put Britain in the wealthy position that it was in today. The European Union and its members, particularly France, Holland and Spain, and other countries like Germany and Denmark had also participated in this genocide as well. 

Racism was not a relic of the past; it was present, global, systemic and was still taking lives.  Yet Europe had yet to fully confront this issue.  One speaker commented that Black communities across Europe were too often overlooked, marginalised and ignored by those in power; this must change.   

There was a painful trail of historical legal construction of racial hierarchy that had occurred during chattel slavery.  This included the British Board of Trade that codified economic enslavement through slave codes and land seizure laws; and France’s Code Noir that created racialised personhood in law.  Portugal and Spain had used religious sanction known as Papal Bulls to erase African legal identity, while the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865 insulated colonial laws from challenge.  Today, these laws had mutated into many forms of structural, perceptual and institutional racism, including through education exclusion, Afrophobia, epistemicide and religious erasure.  These laws must be named, acknowledged, and formally repudiated by the United Kingdom and France as a first step in reparatory processes.

Some speakers noted that chattel slavery was not just a legal and economic construct, it was also a social construct.  When the laws had changed and the cost benefit of slavery was eroded, what remained was institutional racism and structural racism – global inequalities caused by historical injustices.  Those who were descendants of the enslaved lived with the emotional scars of a society that kept ancestors as slaves for longer than people had equal rights under the law.  Chattel slaves were still impacted in deep and wide-ranging ways, with effects spanning economic, social, psychological, and cultural dimensions.  The descendants of the slave owners and the perpetrators of slavery should live with generational repentance. 

One speaker noted that the 2013 Caribbean Community’s Reparations Commission continued to lead the call for reparations.  The Commission recognised that the persistent harm and suffering experienced today by victims of slavery and colonialism was the primary cause of development failure in the Caribbean.  Through its Ten-Point Reparations Plan, it sought to reposition reparations not in terms of a simple transfer of funds, but rather through a plurality of actions such as debt cancellation, education programmes and technology transfer, amongst other elements.

The call for reparations and restorative justice did not come from a void; it had always been part of decolonisation.  The need for reparations was a pressing and current issue across all parts of the world affected by the African slave trade.  Reparations should be accessible in the form of compensation, addressing the deficits in equity and opportunity.  Reparations were about transforming systems, narratives and institutions, and creating a Europe where black lives were not just tolerated but celebrated and empowered. 

Some speakers noted that the Convention needed to be more concertedly mobilised as a framework which was central to achieving reparations directly, including through article 6.  The Committee needed to underscore that reparations were required under the Convention.  It was recommended that European governments begin with a sincere formal apology.  However, apologies without material or structural redress were merely symbolic and could never compensate for the wealth extraction, trauma, or the ongoing inequalities faced by African descendants.  Reparations were about reforming entire legal, economic and social structures that still had forms of racism at their core in the present.  It was not just about addressing harms in the past, but also dealing with those in the present.  The Durban Declaration and Programme for Action and its framework provided for combatting racism and should be powerful guidance for the Committee as it prepared the general recommendation. 

A speaker said the European Union and its Member States should ensure that the European Union’s anti-racism action plan was renewed, with a focus on reparatory justice.  The European Union and the United Kingdom should jointly fund a reparations programme on an intergenerational basis.  This was not a development issue; it was a justice issue. The United Kingdom and the European Union should start engaging with the political leadership of the Caribbean Community to achieve reparatory justice. 

Discussion

Several speakers spoke from the floor. One speaker said during the Second International Decade for People of African Descent, the international community should act to acknowledge and rectify longstanding economic and social inequities, which had economically stagnated the region and resulted in protracted inter-generational trauma.  Another speaker reiterated strong support for the general recommendation.  The sixtieth anniversary of the Convention should also be used as an opportunity to acknowledge the victories of civil society led by African people, including the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. Racism was a disease, and the actions by the Committee to combat all forms of racism were appreciated.  A speaker said that according to research, stakeholders across the region in all 15 Caribbean Community countries had emphasised the connection between the transatlantic slave trade and unequal access to land ownership, which constituted a continuation of historical injustice. 

Closing Remarks

VERENE ALBERTHA SHEPHERD, Committee Vice-Chairperson, in closing remarks, thanked everyone for the amazing discussion which was a social justice exercise that would hopefully reset global relations.  Racism and racial discrimination were creatures of colonialism and many States parties to the Convention still suffered from the legacies of colonialism, especially those that suffered the ravages of the transatlantic trafficking in enslaved Africans, chattel enslavement, and socio-economic underdevelopment in the post-slavery period.  The interventions this afternoon had raised awareness on the racialised nature of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the ways in which, along with chattel enslavement and unjust enrichment, race and racism were attached to people from Africa and skin shade discrimination was further used to deny them rights.

There had been several key takeaways from the discussion, including that African chattel enslavement was the first global regime of State-legalised racial capitalism.  Chattel enslavement, an invention of Europeans, was an organised and intentional system based on the legal determination that enslaved Africans were non-human.   

Chattel enslavement was not gender neutral.  Racism was a direct legacy of the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery, and was an ongoing harm to all who experienced it.  Another takeaway issue was that as chattel enslavement ended, new anti-Black institutions were developed to maintain racial hierarchies, creating persistent economic and social disadvantages for Africans and people of African descent that continued to this present day.  Chattel slavery had no foundation in international law at that time, just as it had no legitimacy under international law today.

However, as some of the legal experts on the panels had shown, there were legal tools which made reparations unavoidable.  The law could now be rightfully and effectively applied to deliver justice for the profound and continuing harms caused by the trafficking in Africans, chattel enslavement, and the colonisation of Africa.

It was time that such an injustice be reversed by the payment of reparations to the descendants of those harmed, to ensure the development of areas exploited for the development of Europe. This must start with restitution of the ransom extracted from Haiti and the modern equivalent of the 20 million pounds paid by Britain to enslavers.

Ms. Shepherd thanked all those who had made the discussion possible and pledged her support to the general recommendation. 

GAY MCDOUGALL, Committee Vice-Chairperson, thanked all those who had been involved in the panel discussions and those who had made the half day of general discussion possible. 

MICHAL BALCERZAK, Committee Chairperson, thanked everyone who had been involved in the discussion, which would help inform the work of the Committee. 

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