STATEMENT OF H.E. MAHMOUD ALI YOUSSOUF, CHAIRPERSON OF THE AFRICAN UNION COMMISSION
DELIVERED BY H.E. AMBASSADOR AMMA A. TWUM-AMOAH, COMMISSIONER FOR HEALTH, HUMANITARIAN AFFAIRS AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
AT
THE HIGH-LEVEL EVENT ON REPARATORY JUSTICE FOR THE TRAFFICKING OF ENSLAVED AFRICANS AND THE RACIALIZED CHATTEL ENSLAVEMENT OF AFRICANS

24TH MARCH 2026 | 10.00 AM – 1.00PM
UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS | CONFERENCE ROOM 3

YOUR EXCELLENCY JOHN DRAMANI MAHAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF GHANA,
OSABERIMA KWESI ATTA II, OGUAMANHEN OF THE CAPE COAST TRADITIONAL AREA,
HONOURABLE MINISTERS,
CHIEF DU CABINET OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS,
EXCELLENCIES PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED NATIONS MEMBER STATES,
REPRESENTATIVES OF PEOPLES OF AFRICAN DESCENT,
ESTEEMED MEMBERS OF AU, UN AND CARICOM REPARATIONS MECHANISMS,
DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS AND EXPERTS,
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

It is a profound honour to address you at this High-Level Event on reparatory justice for the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialized chattel enslavement of Africans.

I wish at the outset to express high appreciation to His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, President of the Republic of Ghana, for his leadership in convening this important meeting and for his invaluable contribution and custodianship as the African Union Leader on Advancing the Cause of Justice and Payment of Reparations to Africans and People of African descent. I also wish to recognize the invaluable contribution of His Excellency Faure Essozimna GNASSINGBE, President of the Council of the Republic of Togo for the leadership in hosting the Ninth Pan African Congress in Lomé last December and in tabling the successive AU Assembly decisions on qualification of slavery, deportation and colonization as crimes against humanity and genocide against the peoples of Africa.

We meet today not only to remember what was done to Africa and her scattered children, but to act together so that history's open wound becomes a site of healing, reconstruction, and renewal.

Excellencies, Distinguished participants,

I wish to highlight that in my annual report earlier this year to the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, I stressed that reparatory justice is no longer a peripheral moral appeal; it is now a structured continental programme anchored in our Agenda 2063 and its Second Ten-Year Implementation Plan.

Through Assembly Decision 884, our leaders designated 2025 as the African Union Theme of the Year: "Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations." This transformed reparations from a slogan of conscience into an organizing principle of policy, a bridge between historical truth and development sovereignty, between memory and the transformation of global power relations.

Across our Union, we have treated reparatory justice as a cross-cutting enabler, not a narrow sector. Over the past year, the African Union has taken decisive steps to give this agenda an institutional backbone. We established a Coordination Team on Reparations, housed in our Citizens and Diaspora Directorate, to ensure that every department, organ, specialized agency and liaison office carries part of this responsibility. Pursuant to the mandates given by our Assembly and Executive Council, we constituted and convened the African Union Committee of Experts on Reparations and the African Union Reference Group of Legal Experts on Reparations, whose inception meetings in December 2025 developed substantive framework papers and working groups on legal foundations, modalities of reparations, and global advocacy. These mechanisms signal a simple truth that Africa is organising for justice.

Excellencies, Distinguished participants,

At the political level, our Assembly has spoken with unprecedented clarity. In Decision 934 of February 2025, and reaffirmed in February 2026, the Union has decided to qualify transatlantic enslavement, deportation and colonization as crimes against humanity and acts of genocide against the peoples of Africa, and to work collectively for their recognition as such at the international level. This is a watershed moment. To name these atrocities clearly is to remove the last veils of ambiguity from the historical record. It is to say that what was done to Africans was not a tragic accident of history, but the result of deliberate policies whose legacies structure today's inequalities. Justice begins with calling things by their proper name.

Our Union has also endorsed the outcomes of major continental and diaspora processes that give this agenda concrete direction. The Assembly welcomed the International Conference on the Crimes of Colonialism in Africa, held in Algiers from 30th November to 1st December, 2025, and endorsed its Declaration as a contribution to the criminalization of colonialism and the pursuit of reparations. By this, the Heads of States and Government designated 30th November as the African Day of African Martyrs and Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Colonisation and Apartheid.

The Republic of Togo, in coordination with the Commission, convened the 9th Pan-African Congress in Lomé from 8 to 12 December 2025, under the theme "Renewal of Pan-Africanism and Africa's Role in Multilateral Institutional Reform – Mobilise Resources and Reinvent for Action," and our Assembly has endorsed its Final Declaration and Master Plan. These two instruments call for strengthened continental and diasporic cooperation, for the restitution of cultural property, and for mechanisms of reparation and recognition of historical crimes.

One powerful example of this broader reparatory vision is the initiative to "Correct the Map of Africa on the Globe," proposed by the Republic of Togo and welcomed by our Assembly. The Mercator projection, used for centuries, shrinks Africa on the world map, distorting its true size and, by extension, contributing to the minimization of its economic, cultural and geopolitical significance.

In response, our leaders have decided to adopt the Equal Earth cartographic projection to more accurately represent Africa and have urged Member States to revise their curricula accordingly. This is more than a technical choice: it is an act of cognitive justice.

Excellencies, Distinguished participants,

We have also extended our temporal horizon. Our Assembly has endorsed the extension of the 2025 Theme of the Year into a 2026–2035 Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations. A theme can initiate; a decade can institutionalize!

By adopting this Decade, we are committing ourselves to long-term action: better-resourced expert mechanisms, integration into national policies and school curricula, sustained diplomatic engagement, and closer coordination with African Groups in Geneva, New York and other multilateral centres. The Decade is our way of telling history that we will no longer visit justice as a temporary guest; we are giving it a permanent address in our institutions.

Reparations, in our understanding, are not only about the past; they are also about rebalancing the present and securing the future. The several decisions adopted by our leaders envision and inspire aligning the reparations agenda with structural reforms in global governance, including the UN Security Council, as well as those related finance, trade, technology, and environmental, through effective participation in the reform of multilateral institutions and in climate and digital justice debates. The two new AU mechanisms on restorative justice have thus formed a working group on global governance structural reparations which would focus its attention to this crucial aspect of the justice and reparations agenda.

Reparations to the pursuit of epistemic justice, cultural renewal, scientific and technological equity, and the fight against structural global asymmetries. In this sense, reparations are like restoring a river whose source needs replenishment: they involve not only ensuring the water downstream, but also transforming the systems that caused the shortage to occur, so that new injustices do not perpetuate old ones.

Excellencies, Distinguished participants,

Our partnerships with the wider African Diaspora are central to this vision. In 2025, we operationalized the AU–CARICOM Memorandum of Understanding on Upscaling Engagement with People of African Descent, and together we convened the Second Africa–CARICOM Summit at the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa on 7 September 2025. That Summit adopted the Addis Ababa Declaration on Transcontinental Partnership in Pursuit of Reparatory Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations, which our Assembly has adopted this year as a guiding framework. This partnership has now expanded further with restorative justice being one of the main pillars of the First CELAC Africa Forum, which has convened in Bogota only last week.

In practical terms, we are building a transoceanic architecture of solidarity so that the descendants of those scattered by the enslavement ships can now sit together at the captain's table of global decision-making.

We have also stepped up our engagement with the United Nations system and contributed to the adoption of key resolutions in the Human Rights Council that place reparatory justice at the centre of multilateral deliberations. We are now leaping to another front under the leadership of His Excellency John Dramani Mahama the African Union Leader on Advancing the Cause of Justice and Payment of Reparations to Africans, within the UN’s General Assembly declaring the Trafficking of enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity in line with AU Assembly Decisions 884 and 934.

For the first time, we are also preparing to host a session of the UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent on African soil, at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. These steps show that Africa does not come to the UN only as petitioner; it comes as norm entrepreneur, as a continent determined to co-author the rules of global justice.

Excellencies, Distinguished participants,

Allow me, in closing, to offer three invitations to this distinguished audience.
First, I invite you to join us in fully implementing the Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations, including by integrating its priorities into national policies, educational and cultural frameworks, and diplomatic strategies. Let us ensure that every child in the world learns a history that is truthful about the crimes of transatlantic enslavement, colonialism and apartheid, and hopeful about the possibilities of repair.

Second, I invite the United Nations system and beyond to work with us to transform recognition into restitution, reform and repair. This means supporting normative developments that reflect the qualification of transatlantic enslavement, deportation and colonisation as crimes against humanity and acts of genocide, backing initiatives such as the correction of global cartography as an act of cognitive justice, and aligning development cooperation with the objectives outlined in the Algiers Declaration, the Lomé 9th Pan-African Congress outcomes, and the Addis Ababa Africa–CARICOM Declaration. Justice is not a speech act; it is a budget line, a curriculum change, a treaty reform, a returned artifact, a restructured institution.

Third, I invite civil society, scholars, artists, youth and social movements to continue to be the conscience of this agenda. Resting on the African continent’s imitative since the Abuja Declaration on Reparations in 1993 to this upcoming General Assembly Resolution in 2026, citizens are invited to keep the flame of reparatory justice lit. Today, you have an institutional home to that light, through the Citizens and Diaspora Directorate of the African Union Commission to galvanize the energy of the defendants of reparatory justice across the globe.

Africa, once diminished on maps, now insists on being seen at its true scale - geographically, historically, morally, culturally, economically, diplomatically and globally.
The journey from enslavement to justice, from colonization to liberation, from Apartheid’s segregation to equitable integration is not yet complete. It must pass through the path of reparatory justice to reach true equality.
As Kwame Nkrumah reminded us, “We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”
Today, that forward path is clear. It is a path of truth. A path of justice. A path of restoration.

Excellencies, Distinguished Participants,

Let this not be remembered as another moment of reflection - but as a moment of resolve.
A moment when Africa and its diaspora stood together - not to ask for justice, but to organise for it.
A moment when the world moved beyond acknowledgment - to restitution, to reform and to repair.
And a moment when history itself began to turn - not by chance, but by the collective will of a people determined to reclaim their dignity.
Let us rise from this gathering with one shared conviction: that the injustice of centuries will not outlive the determination of this generation.
And when future generations look back, let them say that this was the moment - when the world began not only to correct its history, but to correct its conscience.

I thank you.