THE HAGUE OUTCOME STATEMENT ANNEX DECLARATION.
FROM DECLARATION TO ACCOUNTABILITY
Commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action
ADOPTED FOLLOWING THE PAN-AFRICAN ROOTS SYNERGY ROUNDTABLE DIALOGUE ·
THE HAGUE, 8TH–9TH AUGUST 2026
CO-AUTHORS
DR. BARRYL A. BIEKMAN, REVEREND ESTHER XOSEI
REVIEW COMMITTEE
DREAD I C.J-THOMPSON, DR. ANGELA SAYLES, DR. NII HAMMOND, DR. LAZARE KI-ZERBO
CO-ORGANIZED BY
LPS-NARECO NL & EPAF-PAD
SUPPORTED BY
LPS, NARECO-NL, 2026 DURBAN PLUS25, PAF-PAD, FEDERATIE AFRO DIASPORA NETWERK, CARICOM REPARATIONS COMMISSION, ENGOCCAR, PARCOE, THE SPECIAL ENVOY OF THE GHANA PRESIDENT ON REPARATIONS
SPONSORED BY
NiNsee, Den Haag
This Statement implements and builds upon The Hague RootsSynergy Declaration on Participatory Reparatory Justice that was adopted on 3 September 2025 in this city. Three things distinguish it.
First, it is adopted by, and answerable to, the constituency it concerns. The state instruments now receiving international attention — the CARICOM Ten Point Plan, the Accra Commitments, the United Nations Resolution — are recent, and we welcome the states that have joined a demand our communities have carried for centuries. Those instruments draw substantially on work produced within the reparations movements across generations, as the preamble records. What distinguishes them is not their content but their custody: they are adopted by states, revised by states and answerable to states, and our contribution often enters them without attribution and without any mechanism by which we may amend what is done with it. This Statement is adopted by African heritage formations of the diaspora in Europe, and may be amended by them.
Second, it grounds participation rights in African knowledge systems, each of which carries a consequence for what may count as reparation. Under Ma'at a remedy is weighed against a standard, and balance is restored only where the harm ceases. Under Ubuntu repair is owed for the destruction of relationship, and achieved in its restoration. Under Serudj Ta the obligation is the remaking of a damaged world, across the relational, the social and the ecological together. Ityala aliboli — 'a crime does not rot' — holds that time cannot alter the truth of what occurred, answering the doctrines of limitations and limitation by which claims in Europe are denied.
Third, it identifies a gap in international standards and calls for it to be closed. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples establishes, at Articles 18 and 19, the right to participate through representatives chosen by the peoples themselves and the duty of states to obtain their free, prior and informed consent. No corollary standard exists for Africans and people of African descent, so our right to representation is unrecognised in the very processes now determining reparations.
A note on the form. This Dialogue brought together African heritage communities, organisations and formations from, The Hague and other cities of the Netherlands and the Kingdom and across the Europe Region; the AUADS Sixth Region High Council; the Deputy ambassador and diplomatic staff of the Republic of Ghana to the Netherlands, the ambassador of Republic Suriname to the Netherlands; the Special envoy of the President of the Republic of Ghana on Reparatory Justice; and from the United Nations Working Group of Experts of People of African Descent, together with allies, partners, and scholars and scientist institutional representatives standing with this work, holding a range of standpoints and arriving by different routes. That plurality is proper to a movement, and a short resolution would not have served it, turning as a resolution does upon convergence at a single settled text and carrying its reasoning unstated. Our voices are also seldom heard and less often carried, and a document that will be transmitted, cited and answered is not afforded to us regularly. We do not have the luxury of making it do one thing only. Parts One and Two therefore set out the ground, which allows those who differ to see what they are differing about; Parts Three and Four carry the asks and the undertakings.
And the form itself is a matter of definition. That such a text must take the shape given it by the institutions we address is an assumption rather than a rule. That shape is set by their standards and proceeds from their epistemologies. A people that determines what would constitute its repair also determines the form in which it states it. We have chosen this one.
The Protocols of Engagement Between Reparations Communities, annexed to this Statement, bind those adopting it as they bind those it addresses.
A short guide for the reader. The Statement runs to four Parts, eighteen sections and a preamble, with three annexes. It may be read straight through, or entered at whichever section concerns you — the Schedule of demands and recommendations annexed to it groups each one by the body it addresses.
The Preamble sets out where we stand: where and when the Maangamizi began; the Pan-African organising in Europe against it, from the seventeenth century to the present; the organisations and people who built that movement; African law and the jurisprudence of our own regional institutions; our own declarations, from Abuja to London, Berlin and The Hague; and the instruments and openings of this moment.
Part One — What we stand on. The Pan-African affirmation, and the African knowledge foundations that govern everything after it: Ma'at, Ubuntu and its equivalents, the Yoruba conception of the person, Serudj Ta, ityala aliboli, the Maangamizi, African languages and African legal creativity. We stand on shoulders of our ancestors.
Part Two - What we claim. What African Reparations are and what distinguishes them; what cannot be counted in any currency; who we are as an unrepresented constituency and who may speak for us; the right to vote and to a Pan-African citizenship; the standards by which participation in any process is to be judged; and what repair is directed toward.
Part Three - Whom we address, and on what terms. It opens by setting out what the Maangamizi consists of in Europe today, so that the obligation of cessation has a determinate object. It then carries what we ask of the African Union and CARICOM, of the states of Europe, of the Holy See and of the international institutions, covering the United Nations Resolution, the Sixth Region, restitution of our ancestral works and remains, knowledge and data and the education of our children, and Afrophobia (Afriphobia).
Part Four — What we undertake. Our own coordination and resourcing; the advocacy and education by which this Statement is to be taught and used; and the follow-up, review and transmission by which we hold ourselves and others to it.
The annexes. The Protocols of Engagement Between Reparations Communities, adopted with this Statement and binding upon those who adopt it; a Schedule of demands and recommendations grouped by addressee; and a Glossary of Terms.
Purpose of this Statement
What this Statement contains
Affirmation
Preamble
PART ONE — WHAT WE STAND FOR
A. Pan-African Affirmation
B. Our knowledge foundations
PART TWO - WHAT WE CLAIM
C. The meaning of reparations
D. Recognition, definition and self-naming
E. Standing, representation and self-representation
F. Participation and integrity
G. Toward what repair is directed
PART THREE - WHOM WE ADDRESS, AND ON WHAT TERMS
H. The Maangamizi as it operates in Europe today
I. Impact of Resolution A/80/L.48 in Europe
J. The African Union's Sixth Region
K. Magnifica Humanitas and the Holy See
L. Restitution and the return of what was taken
M. Knowledge, data and the education of our children
N. Confronting Afrophobia/Afriphobia
PART FOUR — WHAT WE UNDERTAKE
O. Harmonising our voices and strengthening shared capacity
P. Concrete strategies and steps forward
Q. Advocacy and education for implementation
R. Follow-up, review and transmission
ANNEXES: Protocols of Engagement · Schedule of demands and recommendations
by Addressee · and a Glossary of Terms
How to read the clauses
Affirms, Declares, Records, Recognises, Recalls, Rejects, Asserts, Invokes — positions this Statement takes.
Calls upon, Calls for, Demands, Requires, Requests — what we ask of others.
Adopts, Undertakes, Decides, Resolves, Commits, Establishes, Entrusts — what we bind ourselves to.
Text in bold marks additions and amendments made since the first draft.
Affirmation We are an African people. We were made a people again in the holds of ships and on the plantations, in the mines and the mission schools, in the cities of Europe where we were brought and where we came, and in every place our ancestors resisted their capture, their sale, the labour forced from them, and the denial of who they were. We have never accepted that the harm was finished, that the debt had expired, or that others might say on our behalf what our repair requires. We speak here for ourselves, as those before us did, and as those after us will.
Preamble
We, African heritage communities, organisations and formations of the African diaspora
in Europe, assembled in The Hague on 8 and 9 August 2026 for the Pan-African Roots
Synergy Roundtable Dialogue.
Declaring at the outset the sense in which this Statement speaks. Where it says we and our without further specification, it means the African heritage communities, organisations and formations of the African diaspora in Europe assembled here and those adopting this Statement. Where a wider or narrower body is meant - African peoples as a whole, our movement formations, our communities in a particular country, or our ancestors - the Statement says so.
Affirming that our organising attitude has been Pan-African from the beginning, and was so before the word existed. Those who first pressed this demand in Europe did not organise as members of one African nation or as nationals of one state. They organised across the boundaries into which we had been divided, and across the distance between the continent and the diaspora, because the harm had been done to us as African people. It could be answered only by organising as African people. Pan-Africanism is therefore at the core of reparations organising, its objectives are the attainment and securing of holistic reparatory justice, and its liberation and nation-building goals have been central to reparations organising in Britain and across the Europe Region.
Recalling that the Maangamizi was set in motion from Europe, and that its justifications were manufactured here. In 1441 the Portuguese sailor Antão Gonçalves captured twelve Africans from present-day Mauritania. In 1444 the first state-sponsored mass auction of 235 captured Africans was held at Lagos in Portugal, inaugurating the global racial capitalism that made the so-called Age of Discovery and the Industrial Revolution possible. The papal bulls issued from Rome licensed it — Dum Diversas in 1452, Romanus Pontifex in 1455 and Inter Caetera in 1493.
Recalling further that our long road begins before that crime and continues beyond it. It begins with Ma'at and Ubuntu, African systems of knowledge, ethics and law that long predate the Maangamizi and are carried by us still.
Recalling also that our organising in Europe against this crime is almost as old as the crime itself. Lourenço da Silva de Mendonça, prince of Ndongo, was procurator of the Black confraternities — the mutual aid and religious brotherhoods of Africans in Lisbon, Castile and Brazil. He carried their case through Lisbon, Madrid and demonstrating Toledo, and filed it before the Vatican on 6 March 1684, accusing the Vatican, Italy, Spain and Portugal of a crime against humanity. Mendonca’s Pan African kufunda, was three hundred and forty-two years before the United Nations recognized and declared the same.
Recalling that the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 constitutes a foundational event in the history of African liberation and in the making of the modern world. In Saint-Domingue, enslaved Africans and their descendants transformed resistance to racialised chattel enslavement into a revolutionary struggle that defeated slavery, colonial rule and the armies sent to restore them. Restitution of history precedes restitution of memory; restitution of memory is part of restitution of dignity. And further Haiti's material contribution to the liberation of other peoples of the Americas.
Recalling the Sons of Africa, among the earliest documented Pan African Groups organising in Europe to effect and secure reparatory justice, whose members were reparationists. Their members were reparationists and not abolitionists alone. Attobah Kwodjo Enu, known as Ottobah Cugoano, published Thoughts and Sentiments in 1787, the first abolitionist publication in English by an African. He wrote to the Prince of Wales that year: 'we have no institution of Ambassadors to demand restitution for the injuries which the Europeans have pursued against us'. The demand was carried further in the post-script to the 1791 edition. and has its roots in the communities that brought Jonathan Strong's Kufunda to prominents.
Recalling further the Pan-African Conferences and Congresses convened in Europe: the First Pan-African Conference, called in London in 1900 by Henry Sylvester Williams and Alice Kinloch; the Pan-African Congresses that met in Paris, Brussels, London and Lisbon between 1919 and 1923; the International Conference of Negro Workers convened in Hamburg in 1930 by the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers under Otto Huiswoud; and the Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945, organised by the Pan-African Federation with George Padmore, Ras Makonnen, Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, Peter Abrahams and Amy Ashwood Garvey, who chaired its opening session and co-chaired the Congress with W. E. B. Du Bois.
Recalling what the Manchester Congress established, which is the principle this Statement carries forward: that the masses of the people in Africa and the diaspora must represent themselves, through their own delegates, in the matters that affect them; that nothing is to be decided about us without us; and that any demand, declaration or programme must have a mass character and be people-centred.
Honouring the organisations through which that movement was built in Europe — the Sons of Africa, the African Association, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre, the West African Students' Union, the League of Coloured Peoples, the International African Service Bureau, the Union Congolaise and the Pan-African Federation — and those who built it: Olaudah Equiano; Dusé Mohamed Ali; the Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey; Lamine Senghor and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté in Paris; Paul Panda Farnana in Brussels; Otto and Hermina Huiswoud and Anton de Kom in the Netherlands; Amílcar Cabral in Lisbon; May Ayim in Berlin; and C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Dorothy Kuya, Bernie Grant and Ambassador Dudley Thompson.
Recording that the part played by African women in organising this movement in Europe has had too little recognition. Amy Ashwood Garvey organised and chaired at the Manchester Congress of 1945 and pressed the position of African women upon a Congress that had not raised it. Adelaide Casely-Hayford shaped the earlier Congresses held in Europe. African women have organised in Britain and across the Europe Region since, and their frontline role belongs in this record.
Honouring Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola GCFR, known as M. K. O. Abiola, who convened the World Conference on Reparations to Africa and Africans in the Diaspora at Lagos, Nigeria in 1990, chaired the Organization of African Unity's Group of Eminent Persons on Reparations established out of it, and sponsored the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations at Abuja in 1993, from which the Abuja Proclamation issued. That process engaged diaspora formations in Europe directly, and the reparations organising of African heritage communities here was built out of it.
Recalling the consolidation at Abuja of Professor Chinweizu's definition of reparations as self-made repairs across every dimension of life .
Welcoming the presence and contribution of allies, partners and institutions standing in solidarity with this work, whose support is recognised and is sought in carrying it forward,
Recognising the longevity and historicity of African heritage formations organising in Europe - among them the convenors of this Dialogue, the National Platform Dutch Slavery Past, the National Reparations Commission of the Netherlands (NARECO-NL) and the Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent (EPAF-PAD); alongside the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE); the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign and its educational arm the Maangamizi Educational Trust (MET); the Europe-Wide NGO Consultative Council for Afrikan Reparations (ENGOCCAR); the Global Afrikan People's Parliament (GAPP); the African Union African Diaspora Sixth Region High Council (AUADS); the National Institute for Dutch Slavery Past and Legacy (NiNsee); the European Pan-African Co alition for Reparatory Justice (EPAC-RJ); the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR); and the national platforms and the country chapters of the African diaspora across the Europe Region - and acknowledging the many other formations, past and present, whose work is not named here and is not thereby diminished,
Recognising further that reparations movement building in Europe has been sustained through an organised movement: the Pan-African Congresses and Conferences convened here, the reparations conferences, summits, assemblies and annual convenings sustained across decades, the declarations adopted, and the coalitions, networks and platforms built and maintained. That movement has pursued a deliberate strategy through parliaments, courts, media, institutions and community spaces. Beneath it lies the everyday labour that sustains it: the meetings in front rooms and community halls, the supplementary and weekend schools, the bookshops, libraries and archives built from nothing, the petitions, marches, pickets and vigils. Educators, healers, cultural workers, elders, spokespersons, organisers and movement builders have held that space across generations without recognition, and at a cost in persecution, discrimination, surveillance and public ridicule.
Recalling the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights of 1981 as the instrument in which African jurisprudence vests rights in peoples — equality of peoples and freedom from domination under Article 19; existence, self-determination and liberation under Article 20; wealth, natural resources and recovery in case of spoliation under Article 21; development under Article 22; a satisfactory environment under Article 24; and duties alongside rights under Articles 27 to 29, each invoked in the operative clauses below.
Recalling also the centuries-long Pan-African reparations jurisprudence set out by Dr Panashe Chigumadzi, Rapporteur of the African Union Committee of Experts on Reparations, who conceptualised and drafted the African Union Framework for Reparations, A Crime Does Not Rot, 1441–Present. We rely upon that jurisprudence, and upon the rulings of the African regional institutions on reparations to peoples. The Endorois decision of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights of 2010 recognised a community as a people; the Ogiek proceedings before the African Court produced a reparations judgment in 2022 ordering restitution of ancestral land and awarding damages to a people. We recall also the African Union Transitional Justice Policy of 2019 and the Maputo Protocol of 2003.
Recalling Article 3(q) of the 2003 Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union, the Accra Proclamation of 2023, the Global African Diaspora Summit Declaration of 2025 and ACHPR Resolution 616 (2024).
Recalling that Africans conceived and pioneered the right to development as a formal legal concept, through African decolonial legal thought and jurists including Judge Kéba M'Baye of the International Court of Justice, and codified it first in Article 22 of the African Charter as a justiciable collective right vested in peoples.
Noting further the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development of 4 December 1986 (Resolution 41/128), and recording our concern that the original African conceptualisation — collective, justiciable and vested in peoples — is not fully carried through into it, as set out in the operative clauses below.
Reaffirming The Hague RootsSynergy Declaration on Participatory Reparatory Justice, adopted in this city on 3 September 2025 at the close of the Building Power for Reparatory Justice Dialogue, drafted by Pan-African civil society organisations of the Europe Region, at a gathering in which representatives of the CARICOM Reparations Commission took part; the Berlin Declaration of 2025 of the Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent; prior to that the Brussel Declaration on Reparatory Justice adopted in November 2024 of the Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent and the London Pan-African Declaration, agreed and adopted on 9 April 2025 at The London Conference, 125 Years Later: Pan-Africanism and a Dialogue on Reparations, handed to Professor Robert Dussey, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and African Integration of Togo, who received it affirming that 'there are no African peoples. There is only one African people, wherever they live and whatever their nationality',
Recalling in particular that the London Pan-African Declaration affirms Pan-Africanism to be fundamentally a movement of African people rather than of states, while welcoming the committed participation of African states that align themselves with African people's aspirations for liberation and unity; that it commits us to rigorous self-examination and self-repair, to participatory approaches at all levels safeguarding against the seduction of movement capture, elite capture and state capture of our reparations cause, and to ensuring that the benefits of reparations reach all African people rather than being diverted to a privileged few; that it calls for the transformation of the African Union and CARICOM into people-centred emancipatory institutions through the direct participation of African people, Indigenous African leadership formations and grassroots movements in their decision-making, moving beyond state-centred diplomacy; and that it recognises non-territorial autonomy as a practical implementation of Pan-African principles for people of African ancestry displaced from ancestral homelands.
Recalling the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action of 2001, in its twenty-fifth year; the First and Second International Decades for People of African Descent (2015–2024 and 2025–2034); the African Union's designation of 2026–2035 as the Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations; General Assembly Resolution A/RES/76/300 on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; and the principles, provisos and pathways identified by the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, with their recommendations for a comprehensive, progressive and inclusive global approach to reparatory justice (A/HRC/60/77),
Recalling further the European Parliament resolution of 26 March 2019 on the fundamental rights of people of African descent in Europe (2018/2899(RSP)), adopted by 535 votes to 80 with 44 abstentions, which recognised Afrophobia, Afriphobia and anti-Black racism as one specific form of racism correlating to colonialism and the trafficking of enslaved Africans; and the 2017 statement of the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights to the same effect.
Recalling Decision Assembly/AU/Dec.934(XXXVIII) on the Qualification of Slavery, Deportation and Colonization as Crimes against Humanity and Genocide against the Peoples of Africa, adopted unanimously by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union at its 38th Ordinary Session on 16 February 2025. The item was advanced by Professor Robert Dussey, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and African Integration. The charge it carries is not new to us: African peoples have charged genocide since the We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations of 1951, through the Abuja Proclamation of 1993, and in the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign, which carries it in its name. What is new is that African states have now made it, and that deportation is named among the acts.
Welcoming United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/80/L.48 of 25 March 2026, tabled by Ghana on behalf of the African Group with the support of the African Union and CARICOM, which moved the language from the conditional to the indicative and declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans and the racialised chattel enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity; and the acknowledgment offered by the Holy See in Magnifica Humanitas.
Noting the revised CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice and the Accra Next Steps Commitments on Reparatory Justice, adopted at the High-Level Consultative Conference on the Next Steps to United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/80/250 on the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans, held in Accra from 17 to 19 June 2026 ('the Accra Commitments').
Recording that these openings did not fall from the sky, each having been influenced and catalysed by generations of African and African-descendant organising which long predates the involvement of any state.
Noting with concern that the European states bearing the greatest historical responsibility largely abstained from Resolution A/80/L.48 — 123 states in favour, 3 against, 52 abstentions — including states that have already offered apologies for their role in enslavement such as the Netherlands as the “Champion-Apologizer” where the Premier on behalf of the Dutch Cabinet; the Royal House; the Netherlands Central-and ABNAmroBank, Local and Provincial Governments; Council of Churches and Insurance Companies, and that this position will change only through sustained mobilisation within Europe, which requires the engagement and recognition of the organised African diaspora here.
Rejecting the position assigned to us in state-led frameworks, in which our communities are recommended for consultation and our voices are to be reflected while states commit, resolve and undertake; and asserting our standing as authors of the reparations demand and as parties to any process determining its content.
Noting that the revised Ten Point Plan is described as a blueprint for reparations settlement, a settlement being the closure of a claim that remains unrepaired; and holding that no framework originating in one geographical region can be imposed upon the whole African world, the diaspora included.
Recording that the Pan-African Community of Resistance (PACOR), within and beyond the United Kingdom, is asserting rights to non-territorial autonomy as a form of reparations, to address the denial of their peoplehood and of their right to national self-determination. That denial is sustained by African and Caribbean states which do not recognise them as citizens or have not granted citizenship, and by the European states in which they reside, where they hold a second-class citizenship or worse. This claim appears in no state plan.
Mindful of the teaching of Amílcar Cabral, who led the liberation struggle of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, in his General Directive to the Party of 1965, reproduced in Unity and Struggle (1980): 'Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.' And mindful that the struggle against our own weaknesses is the most difficult of all. We take that teaching as binding upon our own organisations and formations as much as upon the states we address, and it governs the truth-telling this Statement requires of us.
Mindful also of Professor Cheikh Anta Diop's instruction: 'You must not abandon discussion out of tact … There should be no concession where there is a question of establishing a scientific truth.' (quoted in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop, 1986, p. 13). This Statement records positions that will be uncomfortable to some who read it, and it does so on that principle.
Parts One and Two set out the positions this Statement takes; Parts Three and Four
contain what we ask of others and what we undertake ourselves. Part One carries
the Pan-African affirmation and the African knowledge foundations upon which
every provision rests.
A. Pan - African Affirmation
What we renew, and the tradition in which we stand.
1 Affirms and renews the Pan-African spirit that has driven change across generations, rooted in the belief in the unity, common history and common purpose of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora;
2 Declares 2026 a Year of Remembrance and Renewal, as the London Pan-African Declaration of 2025 resolved: commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, situating racial justice as a fundamental component of reparatory justice, and amplifying the struggle against systemic racism, discrimination and colonial legacies. This convening is held in that year and in that spirit;
3 Reaffirms The Hague RootsSynergy Declaration on Participatory Reparatory Justice, adopted in this city on 3 September 2025, in its entirety; and declares that this Outcome Statement implements and builds upon that Declaration and supersedes no provision of it;
4 Affirms Pan-African internationalism as among the finest traditions to have come out of African organising in Europe: the practice by which peoples relate directly to peoples — in Africa, in the Caribbean, in the Americas and worldwide — without waiting upon states;
5 Declares that people-to-peoples Pan-African internationalist diplomacy is already being conducted by African diaspora civil society and movements in Europe, and that it should be recognised as a form of international relations in its own right. It is what we do among ourselves, and it reaches where the diplomacy of states does not. Existing states relate to existing states, through foreign ministries, across fixed borders and within fixed protocols, and are bound by the interests of the governments conducting them. Peoples relate to peoples directly, across communities, cultures, languages, faiths, generations and disciplines, and without the permission of any state. Our formations therefore reach constituencies and build relationships that state diplomacy cannot;
B. Our knowledge foundations
The African principles that govern this Statement, and what each of them requires.
6 Affirms that African epistemologies — the systems of knowing, naming and reasoning of African peoples — are the ground on which this struggle is waged, and that our capacity to define our own repair depends upon them; and declares that the principles set out below are the knowledge foundations of African civilisation-building, nation-building and community-building, and that they govern this Statement;
7 Validates African legal creativity: the capacity of African peoples to originate legal concepts, instruments and remedies of our own, sustained through centuries in which what was imposed upon us by force was called law. It is an unbroken practice. Ma'at in ancient Kemet ordered conduct by a standard against which the heart itself was weighed. The Manden Charter of 1235 set out obligations of life, liberty and provision. In Southern African legal thought, as Professor Mogobe Ramose sets out, law is grounded in Ubuntu: where personhood is constituted through relationship, a wrong is a rupture in relation, and the sanctions that follow are directed to restoring the balance that was disturbed;
8 Recalls that African peoples across the continent vested rights in lineages and communities and administered them through their own customary legal orders, in the kgotla — the Setswana assembly and court — and comparable institutions. They held that ityala aliboli — 'a crime does not rot'. This is a Pan-African principle rather than the property of any one people: mhosva haiori in chiShona, deni haliozi in Kiswahili, omusango teguvunda in Luganda, molato ga o bole in Setswana and Sesotho. Restorative jurisdictions such as gacaca in Rwanda and mato oput among the Acholi determined liability and repair without recourse to imprisonment;
9 Records that this creativity continues. The postamble to South Africa's interim Constitution of 1993 names ubuntu as a ground of reparation, and the Constitutional Court has applied it. The African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights of 1981 vests rights in peoples and sets duties alongside them. African jurisprudence framed the right to development as a justiciable collective entitlement. And the African regional institutions have awarded reparations to peoples. We commit to examining continually which knowledge systems we draw upon, and whether their use empowers African heritage communities seeking to restore and regenerate our peoplehood;
10 Recognises the traditions of law from below: the making of law through the struggle of those to whom rights have been denied. The abolition of the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans, the founding of Haiti by Africans who freed themselves and established their own sovereign republic — itself an act of applied reparation — the right of peoples to self-determination and the outlawing of apartheid were each asserted from below long before they were codified above. For a people whose rights have been denied by the very systems asked to vindicate them, law-making from below is the principal method by which our rights have ever been established;
11 Records that peoples' tribunals, community charters and commissions of inquiry constituted by the harmed belong to that tradition, among them the All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ) demanded in the United Kingdom, and the Ubuntukgotla Peoples' International Tribunal, advocated for and being built by the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign;
12 Affirms Ma'at, the principle of truth, justice and balance — and of reciprocity and right order — first set out in Kemet, whose territory reached beyond the borders of present-day Egypt, and applied by us today. Under Ma'at the conduct of the powerful is weighed against a standard, and balance is restored where the harm ceases. Truth, justice and balance are established through the active participation of the communities harmed;
13 Declares that truth-telling under Ma'at is the full naming of what was done, by whom, and to whose enrichment, established by those harmed. The charge lies against the European states that perpetrated the Maangamizi, against the states their settler colonies became, and against the institutions and corporations enriched by it. Truth-telling further requires an accounting for the conduct of those who collaborated — in the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans, in colonial administration, and in the neocolonial arrangements sustained today. African peoples resisted the Maangamizi in every generation and in every territory. Telling both truths is the ground of self-repair, which Professor Chinweizu holds to be constitutive of reparations;
14 Affirms Ubuntu. Its dictum in isiZulu and isiXhosa is 'umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu' — 'a person is a person through other persons'. Personhood is constituted through relationship, and what holds of a person holds of a people. Under Ubuntu repair is owed, and it is owed for the destruction of relationship itself. It is not human-centred: it holds the living, the ancestors, those yet to be born, other species, the land and the cosmos within one web of relation;
15 Recognises that Ubuntu has its equivalents in Botho in Setswana and Sesotho and Hunhu or Unhu in Shona, and stands within a wider family of African relational concepts — among them Ukama, the Shona ethic of relatedness extending relation to the environment, the ancestors and the divine; and Seriti in Sotho-Tswana thought, isithunzi among the Nguni, the dignity and life-force of a person built by acclaiming the dignity of others, so that persons form one field in which any change in one alters all. This plurality is the strength of the tradition, and it grounds our claim that an injury to one is an injury to the whole;
16 Affirms the African Mother Principle: the ordering of society by the generative, nurturing and regenerative capacities that African cosmologies name as feminine, held in balance with those named as masculine, and expressed in the standing of women in governance, culture and ethics. Dr Oba T'Shaka's twin-lineal paradigm, drawn from the Twa-based family systems of ancient Africa, holds that African societies were ordered justly where women and men were equally empowered to govern every phase of them, and that such ordering is not possible where the family itself is unbalanced;
17 Declares accordingly that authority is to be shared rather than held in patriarchal hierarchy, and that the private sphere of African families is to be reclaimed from systemic erosion and commercial exploitation. Reparatory justice on this understanding restores sacred balance within African and African-descended communities, proceeding from African cosmological understandings of reciprocity, complementarity and ancestral continuity, and recognising the interdependence of feminine and masculine forces in sustaining life, governance, memory, healing and transformation. It calls for the full participation and leadership of women and of men, and for the restoration of community structures damaged by enslavement, colonialism, racial domination and patriarchal distortion;
18 Recognises that African conceptions of personhood hold being to be intergenerational as well as relational. Ubuntu, ọmọlúàbí and Safuu each hold this, and from it follows the principle on which our whole claim rests: a crime committed in one generation has consequences for the next, and the obligation it creates passes forward until there is reparation. In Yoruba thought the person comprises ara, the body; èmí, the life-breath; and orí-inú, the inner head which carries destiny, realised through ìwà, character, and ẹsè, human striving, within community. Under the Maangamizi the conditions in which orí can be fulfilled remain under attack — the name, the lineage, the language, the ritual means of alignment and the community within which character is formed — and reparations must restore those conditions, for which no compensation can substitute;
19 Affirms Serudj Ta, the Ma'atian duty to repair, renew and remake the world: to raise up what is in ruins, repair what is damaged, rejoin what is severed, replenish what is depleted, strengthen what is weakened, set right what is wrong, and make flourish what is fragile. Under Serudj Ta, reparations are the obligation to remake a damaged world across the relational, the social and the ecological together — the world-system itself, and not merely an order within it — which the settlement of a quantified loss cannot discharge;
20 Affirms ityala aliboli — 'a crime does not rot' — the Pan-African legal principle, set out by Professor Mogobe Ramose and by Dr Panashe Chigumadzi, that time cannot alter the truth of what occurred and that a wrong remains actionable until it is set right. If a crime does not rot, neither does the obligation to repair it; and affirms its direct application in Europe, where extinctive prescription and limitation are the principal legal doctrines by which the claims of African peoples against European states, institutions and corporations are denied, suppressed and rejected;
21 Declares that two conceptions of time are in contest here. In Western legal thought time is treated as linear containment, and through intertemporality and statutes of limitations it is asserted that time extinguishes obligation. In Pan-African legal thought time carries: a crime is borne forward as a continuing structure of the present until there is reparation. When Britain abstained from Resolution A/80/L.48 on 25 March 2026, it invoked intertemporality; the European Union dismissed 'a crime does not rot' as regional jurisprudence not in keeping with international law. Those are not neutral readings of the law. They are the temporal suppression of African reparations jurisprudence, and we reject them;
22 Affirms the Maangamizi as the name for what was and is done to us. It is a Kiswahili term, brought into the reparations lexicon and popularised by Professor Maulana Karenga, whose analysis is its foundation. It derives from the verb angamiza, to cause destruction, to utterly destroy, the a prefix indicating amplified and massive destruction. It captures intentionality — deliberate, systematic action rather than accident or natural disaster. It names the intentional and continuing systemic destruction perpetrated against African peoples through racialised chattel enslavement, wars of extermination and conquest, colonialism and neocolonisation: one ongoing crime, and not a series of disconnected and closed historical episodes. We name it in our own languages because no European term reaches it — the words available in the languages of those responsible describe a trade, an institution or an era, and none of them names the destruction of a people. A continuum can be stopped; an event can only be commemorated;
23 Records that the Maangamizi operates through four forms of destruction across three dimensions. Genocide: the destruction of African peoplehood, through mass killing and violence against African bodies, the lethal conditions of enslavement, the severing of families, and social death. Ethnocide: the destruction of African nationhood and culture, through the erasure of languages, spiritualities, naming systems and historical narratives, and the forced adoption of the coloniser's ways of life. Epistemicide: the destruction of African ways of knowing, through the deliberate dismantling of African knowledge systems, now reaching into digital epistemicide. Ecocide: the destruction of African environments and ecosystems, through extraction, pollution, deforestation, land grabs and the severing of ecological relationship;
24 Declares that these work as one comprehensive system and not as four separate harms, and that no one of them can be repaired while the others stand. The three dimensions are peoplehood; nationhood, culture and knowledge; and environments. Rooted in crimes against African peoples, this system now reaches other oppressed groups and the more-than-human world, and constitutes crimes against both humanity and Mother Earth;
25 Records that this four-part framework elaborates and builds upon Professor Karenga's analysis, extending it to epistemicide and to crimes against Mother Earth. It completes the mapping of Planet Repairs: reparatory justice repairs genocide and ethnocide; cognitive justice repairs epistemicide; environmental justice repairs ecocide. Planet Repairs is therefore intrinsic to what the Maangamizi is, and not a supplement to reparations;
26 Invokes Decision Assembly/AU/Dec.934(XXXVIII) of 16 February 2025, in which African states qualify slavery, deportation and colonisation as crimes against humanity and as genocide against the peoples of Africa. African peoples, their leaders and their movements have made this charge for generations, and for as long it was refused us. It is now carried by our own continental body; the qualification of deportation as a crime bears directly upon the removals by which our communities were dispersed and upon the deportation regimes operating against us still; and we call for the Decision to be given effect in the common African position, in the work of the African Union organs, and in every forum in which reparations are determined;
27 Affirms the centrality of African languages to effecting and securing Pan-African liberation and reparations. Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o named the cultural bomb by which imperialism destroys a people's belief in their names, their languages, their environment, their heritage of struggle, their unity and their capacities; and named the task of re-membering what was dismembered. Language carries memory, and the restoration of our languages is itself reparation, as is the use of the diaspora formulations
formulations derived from them, among them Kreyòl and the other creole languages through which African peoples in the diaspora have asserted their Africanity. This Statement exercises that practice in its own use of African terms throughout, and we call upon European states and institutions to resource African and diasporic language provision, teaching and transmission in African heritage communities as an element of reparatory justice;
28 Affirms that learning, unlearning and relearning are themselves part of the repair — of our epistemologies, our narrative and our cognition; and records that advances made by our own formations in analysis and terminology are too often disregarded until an intergovernmental body adopts them, a practice we resolve to end among ourselves;
What African Reparations are; who we are and who may speak for us; and the standards by which participation is to be judged.
C. The meaning of reparations
What African Reparations are, what distinguishes them, and what cannot be counted.
29 Affirms that reparations encompass what is owed and what must be returned for the Maangamizi and for its continuation, and reach further: to the restoration of sovereignty and self-determination, which are neither owed as a debt nor returnable as property, but recovered by a people. The Maangamizi persists as a present crime and not as a closed historical one. Those responsible for it, and those enriched by it, must cease the harm, repair what was damaged, restore what was destroyed, give back all that was taken, and guarantee that these harms are never repeated;
30 Affirms that this Statement speaks of African Reparations, and uses that term wherever the context allows, to distinguish our claim from the other claims now made under the general word. The word has become one under which many things travel, and not all of them advance the liberation of African peoples;
31 Declares what makes reparations substantively African: that they proceed from African epistemologies and are defined by African peoples; that they address the Maangamizi as a continuum and require the harm to cease; that they reach relationship, land, lineage, language and cosmology, and the social and civil death imposed upon us, rather than confining themselves to what can be counted and paid; that they advance the self-determination of African peoples rather than their accommodation within
arrangements built upon their dispossession; and that those to whom they are owed determine when repair has been achieved. A policy, programme, plan or initiative meeting none of these may serve real needs and may be desirable in itself; it is something
32 Affirms that the greater part of what was taken, destroyed, suppressed and demonised cannot be quantified in European or American currencies. A framework confining itself to what can be priced addresses a fraction of the harm, and the measure of repair cannot be set by the metrics of those who profited;
33 Recalls that international law already recognises this. The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, establishes the category of non-economic loss and damage. These are harms to individuals, to society and culture, and to the environment which cannot be measured by market prices or by gross domestic product, and which nonetheless require redress. The category is recognised, defined and in use. We claim it;
34 Records that every category of non-economic loss and damage describes harms suffered under the Maangamizi. Losses to individuals: loss of life on the Middle Passage — the ocean crossing on which our ancestors were transported — on the plantations and in the colonial wars; degraded physical health across generations; psychological trauma carried through descent; and the loss of mobility, in the trafficking of our ancestors and in the border and deportation regimes operating against us now. Losses to society and culture: loss of territory; destruction of cultural heritage, ancestral works, sacred sites and burial grounds; the eradication of Indigenous and local knowledge, being epistemicide; the erosion of societal and cultural identity through the severing of language, kinship and community fabric; and the loss of sense of place. Losses to the environment: the loss of biodiversity, of ecosystem services and of genetic resources, being ecocide;
35 Records further that the Warsaw Mechanism recognises the loss of sovereignty and self-governance as a non-economic loss: the loss of territory and habitability, the erasure of traditional governance systems tied to place, the inability of a displaced people to exercise autonomous self-governance, and legal ambiguity over standing and legal personality. That is a description of the African National Question, and of the position of African heritage communities dispersed in the course of the Maangamizi and unrepresented by any state;
36 Calls upon states, institutions and international bodies to apply the standard of non-economic loss and damage to African Reparations as it is applied in the climate context, which is to accept that the harms done to us cannot be quantified in economic terms alone; to develop, with African peoples, the methods by which such losses are to be assessed and addressed; and to accept that assessment of non-economic loss rests with those who sustained it, since no external metric can establish the value of a severed lineage, a lost language or a cosmology broken;
37 Recalls that the London Pan-African Declaration of 2025 already calls for methodologies recognising and quantifying ethnocide and cultural losses as substantive grounds for reparations claims-making and redress, and we take that forward here;
38 Affirms with Professor Rebecca Tsosie that no uniform theory of reparations fits all cultures, all nations and all peoples; that any framework for reparations must be intercultural, accounting for the distinct historical experiences of peoples with those who colonised them and addressing their own epistemologies; and accordingly that reparations for African peoples are to be grounded in African epistemologies, as they are grounded in this Statement;
39 Affirms that reparations must be defined by the peoples against whom these harms were and are committed, because whoever holds the power to define reparations holds the power to decide when repair will be treated as achieved;
40 Invokes the principle that no one may be judge in their own cause — nemo judex in causa sua — which the legal systems of the European states responsible for the Maangamizi hold to be fundamental. Those states, and the institutions and corporations enriched by the Maangamizi, cannot determine what reparations require, what they are worth, or when they have been made. That determination rests with those to whom repair is owed;
41 Affirms that cessation of ongoing harm is the first obligation of repair;
42 Affirms the right to truth and the right to reparation as distinct rights in international law which operate together: the right to truth, developed through the principles on combating impunity and affirmed in international jurisprudence, establishes what was done, by whom and to whose enrichment; the right to reparation proceeds upon that record, and satisfaction as a form of reparation itself requires verification of the facts and full public disclosure. This Statement claims both. And it declares that truth-telling among
among ourselves, between our formations, and between our communities and the states that claim to speak for us is part of healing, and is to be welcomed rather than treated as division;
43 Affirms that reparatory justice must be gender-responsive, on the ground of the African Mother Principle and the twin-lineal paradigm affirmed above, in a manner recognising the distinct harms done to African men and boys as well as to African women and girls. Where gender is addressed in existing frameworks it is frequently reduced to women and girls alone, and that is an imbalance;
44 Records that African women and girls were subjected to sexual violence, rape, reproductive coercion, forced breeding and family separation, and their descendants suffer those harms still; African men and boys were also subjected to sexual violence and rape, documented in the record yet under-explored in the scholarship and seldom named in reparations frameworks. They suffered too the severing of fathers from their children, the denial of their capacity to protect and to provide, forced labour, criminalisation, incarceration and premature death. Reparatory measures must address the experience of both;
45 Affirms that the relation between African women and men must itself be repaired. Under the Maangamizi they were set against one another, through systems of enslavement and colonial administration that made each the instrument of the other's subjugation. Those systems left schisms in our families and communities that persist. The twin-lineal paradigm requires the healing of that rupture, on the basis of mutual respect and love, because a people cannot be restored while its women and men remain divided. What is to be restored is equal partnership, and not the authority of one over the other;
46 Affirms the right to development as Africans conceived it: a collective and justiciable right vested in peoples, codified in Article 22 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, linking economic self-determination directly to international social justice. Article 22 vests the right in peoples and places the corresponding duty upon states: the right-holder and the duty-bearer are different parties. A people therefore has this right whether or not it has a state of its own. We have it as African heritage communities in Europe, and the European states in which we live are duty-bearers, obliged to ensure that we can exercise it. We claim it on that footing, and we distinguish it from development delivered to us on other people's terms, through other people's institutions and measured by other people's indices;
47 Declares that where reparations are routed through the right to development, we assert the African conception: collective, justiciable, vested in peoples, and aimed at decolonial sovereignty and control over our own resources. And declares that the primacy of African epistemologies in defining our repair follows from the same principle: the concept was ours first, it was more fully developed in our hands, and its diluted derivative
48 Declares that for us the right to development is exercised at Pan-African scale. The right is vested in peoples rather than in states. We have it whether or not we hold the citizenship of an African or Caribbean state, and whether or not we reside within one;
49 Records that where the right is treated as belonging to states alone, its exercise is confined within the borders imposed by the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885. That Conference carved up the continent without the consent or participation of African people, cut through peoples and severed Indigenous nations. A right belonging to a people is thereby administered through the states into which that partition divided them. We claim it at the scale it requires: the African people as a whole, continental and diasporic. We claim it also on the principle of endogenous development, set out by the historian Professor Joseph Ki-Zerbo: 'on ne développe pas, on se développe' — 'one is not
50 Declares further that African peoples, on the continent and in the Caribbean alike, cannot develop without their diasporas. Country diasporas, regional diasporas and the African diaspora as a whole have sustained remittances, skills, advocacy and political pressure across generations, at real cost to themselves, and continue to do so. Where development is conceived so that we are treated as outside the peoples we belong to, or drawn upon as a resource without being recognised as a party, what we have already given is understated and what could be built together is foreclosed;
51 Invokes Article 21(2) of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, under which a people dispossessed of its wealth and natural resources holds the right to the lawful recovery of its property and to adequate compensation. This is an express right of restitution and compensation for spoliation, vested in peoples, in a binding African treaty. We rely upon it for the recovery of what was taken, alongside the broader grounds this
52 Invokes Article 20 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, under which colonised and oppressed peoples have the right to free themselves from the bonds of domination by all means recognised by the international community, and are entitled to the assistance of States Parties in their liberation struggle. Reparations are the continuation of that struggle, and that assistance is owed to us;
53 Invokes Article 24 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, under which all peoples have the right to a general satisfactory environment favourable to their development. This right, and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment recognised in General Assembly Resolution A/RES/76/300, ground our charge of ecocide in African and international law rather than in the language of climate finance. Planet Repairs — the nexus of cognitive justice, environmental justice and reparatory justice — proceeds from this. The property logics of chattel enslavement now threaten the planet itself. From the invasion of the Americas those who imposed them forced a violent transition from Indigenous communal land stewardship and polycultures to private property and extractive monocultures of sugar, tobacco and cotton. The emissions that drive the climate crisis are inseparable from the plantation that preceded them, and
54 Affirms Articles 27 to 29 of the African Charter, which set duties alongside rights — towards family, society, the State and the international African community, including the duty to preserve and strengthen positive African cultural values and to contribute to the achievement of African unity. African law does not separate a right from the obligations that accompany it. The Charter carries that understanding into treaty form, and it binds us
55 Recalls that the African regional institutions have already awarded reparations to peoples. In Endorois the African Commission recognised a community as a people holding rights to its ancestral land; in Ogiek the African Court ordered restitution of ancestral land and awarded material and moral damages. Where the courts of perpetrator states decline jurisdiction, African regional jurisprudence has proceeded. We record this because it establishes that reparations to peoples are already justiciable, and we call for
56 Affirms that reparatory justice is the objective, and that success is judged by whether repair is advanced; that an apology or declaration is a necessary step and not the goal; and that state action is one indicator of progress and not the whole of it. Progress shows also in the growth of the institutions African heritage communities build for themselves, and in the transmission of our knowledge to the next generation. It shows in the recovery of our languages, cosmologies and spiritual traditions, in the land our communities hold and steward, in the healing done within our families, and in the capacity of our formations to
D. Recognition, definition and self-naming
Who we are, how we are counted, and by what names we call ourselves. 57 Records that the African Union defines the African diaspora as people of native African origin living outside the continent, irrespective of citizenship and nationality, who are willing to contribute to the development of the continent, and recognises the diaspora as its Sixth Region. That definition conditions belonging upon a willingness to contribute, and does not reach communities dispersed in the course of the Maangamizi who are unrecognised by any state;
58 Records further that states frequently use the term African diaspora to mean their own nationals residing abroad, so that engagement with a country's expatriate citizens is reported as engagement with the African diaspora, while the communities dispersed by kidnapping, the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans, colonial deportation and exile remain unengaged;
59 Calls for an inclusive definition and approach, holding our plurality together: the descendants of those trafficked and enslaved; those dispersed by colonialism and its aftermath; refugees and political exiles; more recent migrants; and those born in Europe of African heritage. The African Union's own formulation recognises people of African origin living outside the continent irrespective of citizenship and nationality, and we affirm that this recognition should not be conditional upon a willingness to contribute to continental development, since belonging is not earned by utility;
60 Declares that any actor reporting engagement with the African diaspora should state which constituencies it engaged, through which formations, and by what mandate, since engagement with a few selected organisations is frequently reported as engagement with all of us. We record further that CARICOM member states do not represent the African diaspora, and that Article 3(q) of the Constitutive Act does not confine recognition of the Sixth Region to states;
61 Affirms the right of a people to name itself, this being an element of self-determination and of cognitive justice; and records that the African heritage communities and formations in Europe that have carried the reparations demand longest name themselves as an African diaspora and as an African people, across the many ethnicities, nationalities, regions and territories from which we come;
62 Affirms Pan-African notions of peoplehood as the ground of this Statement. We are African people wherever we are located, and the perpetrators of the Maangamizi set out to destroy our peoplehood, and not our ancestry alone. We are also in a process of ethnogenesis, constituting and rediscovering ourselves as a people across the rupture. The Abuja Proclamation of 1993 names it, being convinced that the pursuit of reparations
reparations by the African peoples in the continent and in the Diaspora will itself be a learning experience in self-discovery and a uniting experience politically and psychologically;
63 Records a tendency in current scholarship and policy to displace Pan-Africanism with the language of a 'global African' population. The difficulty is this: an aggregate may be described, counted, planned for and spoken for by others, where a people constitutes itself, determines its own interests and speaks for itself. The change of term is therefore a change in who holds authority. We reject that displacement. And we affirm the Pan-Africanism we restore, repair and transform to serve our liberation purposes: a living tradition we inherit, correct where it has been used to unify peoples from above, and carry forward as the ground of our self-determination;
64 Records accordingly that Afrodescendant and the prefix Afro-are not the terms by which we generally name ourselves in Europe. In Britain and across much of the rest of Europe our communities name themselves African — African people, people of African descent, people of African heritage and ancestry. In our usage the noun is African. Afro-is a prefix, and a prefix qualifies a noun rather than naming one. We are an African people, and the harm done to us is named accordingly;
65 Calls upon states, institutions and multilateral bodies to use the terms by which the communities concerned name themselves, and to refrain from standardising categories across regions;
66 Records that the African diaspora in Europe numbers, on commonly cited estimates, between nine and fifteen million people, no reliable disaggregated count existing — the absence of equality data being itself among the harms this Statement addresses;
67 Records further that we hold no state of our own outside the African and Caribbean homelands; that large numbers among us hold no African or Caribbean citizenship, by reason of historical dispossession and continuing non-recognition; and that those of us who do hold such citizenship are in most cases unable to vote in, or be represented by, the states whose documents we carry;
E. Standing, representation and self-representation
Who may speak for us, upon what mandate, and what we contribute already.
68 Declares that we are an unrepresented constituency; that holding the citizenship of an African, Caribbean or any other state confers upon that state no mandate to represent us; and that any actor seeking to engage the African diaspora in Europe must engage the formations through which we represent ourselves;
69 Records that the revised CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice: A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment is described by CARICOM as a document prepared principally for the governments and people of the Caribbean, but conceptualised and designed to facilitate and guide the Global African Reparations Movement; and that its own introduction states the revision to be intended to promote its global reach and solidarity, with greater focus directed at Africa-diaspora engagement among other matters. We record that African heritage communities in Europe are not recognised within it. That includes those holding the citizenship of CARICOM member states, whose harms continue in the countries where they now reside. No mandate was sought from them for a document conceived to guide a movement of which they are part;
70 Records further that the Accra Commitments do recognise the African diaspora. Africans and People of African Descent is their standard formulation, and a full strategic pillar is given to diaspora engagement, citizenship and the right of return. We appear there, however, as recipients of state engagement rather than as parties holding standing: offered cultural and knowledge exchanges, inclusive investment policies and voluntary return and reintegration pathways, with entry and residence to be granted where there are no disqualifying grounds determined by the state. Where Europe is mentioned, our communities are named after those of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.
71 Declares respectfully, and to all the states concerned, that we do not accept representation constituted without our participation. Where any state or intergovernmental body speaks on matters affecting African diaspora communities in Europe, it should do so upon a mandate obtained from those communities through their own organisations and formations, and should state the basis of that mandate on the record;
72 Records our material contribution to the economies of Africa and the Caribbean. Remittances to Africa amounted to approximately one hundred billion United States dollars in 2024, and to over one hundred and twenty-four billion in 2025 — roughly twice the level of official development assistance to the continent, and, since 2010, exceeding both official development assistance and foreign direct investment. In the Caribbean, remittances rose from 9.2 per cent of regional gross domestic product in 2024 to an estimated 10 per cent in 2025, standing above 40 per cent of gross domestic product in Haiti and near 20 per cent in Jamaica, and exceeding 10 per cent in Guyana. These transfers are made by our own communities. African heritage communities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, whether they came directly from Africa or by way of the Caribbean or the wider Americas, are among the principal sending constituencies for
73 Records further that the share of these flows originating in Europe is not separately published. The published breakdowns leave the European contribution unstated, and no Europe-specific figure is published for Africa. Our contribution is therefore substantial and unmeasured, in the same way that our numbers, our conditions and the discrimination we face are unmeasured. We call upon the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the African Union and CARICOM to disaggregate remittance data by sending country and region, so that what the African diaspora in Europe contributes is placed on the record;
74 Declares that this contribution carries a corresponding standing. As was said at this Dialogue: no remittances without representation. Where states advance reparations
positions that concern us, reciprocity should take a definite form. We should be consulted
before those positions are settled. Our coalitions, organisations and campaigning
formations should be named, recognised and accredited to the processes in which those
positions are advanced. Our concerns should appear in the positions themselves. And we
should have a vote in the states whose citizenship we hold;
75 Affirms that part of our repair is the recognition of our own political status. As African heritage communities in Europe we have never abdicated the right to national self-determination, and we have it still. Many of us are citizens of African and Caribbean states, and that citizenship has brought us neither recognition nor influence upon the positions those states advance in our name. The mandate of a state runs to the citizens resident within its territory, and extends to us only where we confer it. What we assert is our own standing as a people; and where those states speak on matters concerning us, we ask that they do so upon a mandate obtained from us. That African and Caribbean states have not recognised this status is a separate matter, and one we place before them;
76 Records that this is why movements have formed in the diaspora to represent African peoples living as national minorities within the states of others. African peoples are a
global majority; the term names our position within particular states, where we are
nations minoritised within polities dominated by others, and it carries in international law
a body of rights attaching to peoples in that position. On that basis we assert the right to
national self-determination;
77 Records further that formations in Britain organising as the Maatubuntujamaa — the African Heritage Community for National Self-Determination — assert rights to non-territorial autonomy, exercisable across the country rather than within any territory of it, and are building the institutions through which those rights are held. Non-territorial
territorial autonomy is the exercise of collective self-government by a people over its own affairs — its institutions, education, culture, law and representation — without holding a territory of its own. It is a legitimate form of self-determination for African peoples dispersed across the world through the kidnapping, trafficking and enslavement of Africans who held standing within their nations and lineages, under law of their own making, and the colonial occupation and dispossession that followed, as the London Pan-
78 Records also that the Maatubuntujamaa connects organically with the Sankofahomes, the spaces of return and intergenerational transmission being built on the continent. This formulation has been championed by the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, the Global Afrikan People's Parliament and the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign, and we know of no comparable formulation yet
79 Asserts the right to vote. Members of our communities hold the citizenship of African and Caribbean states by birth, by naturalisation and by descent — the last being a category many Caribbean states recognise, which must be separately applied for, and which is granted on the same footing as any other citizenship. In most cases none of these carries a vote. We are excluded from external voting arrangements, from parliamentary representation for citizens abroad, and from every process by which those states form the positions they advance in our name. Where we are citizens, by whatever route, we should
80 Calls upon African Union and CARICOM member states to establish diaspora voting rights and diaspora parliamentary representation for their citizens abroad, as a number of states already have. Cape Verde has elected diaspora deputies to its National Assembly since 1995, through constituencies that include Europe; in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic elects seven representatives of its diaspora to Congress. Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola make comparable provision, and the arrangements are set out in the briefing document accompanying this Statement. What some African and Caribbean states have done, all can do; and we ask that it be done as a matter of reparatory justice rather than of administrative convenience;
81 Records the contrast within the Caribbean: Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados are among the states most active and most publicised in advancing the reparations demand, and none of them enfranchises its diaspora. Jamaican, Guyanese and Barbadian heritage communities in Britain sustain a substantial part of those economies, and hold no vote in the states advancing a reparations agenda in their name. Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Botswana and Namibia permit citizens abroad to vote without reserved seats;
82 Calls for the development of a Pan-African citizenship, alongside the citizenships of particular African and Caribbean states. Those citizenships matter and we pursue them, and they are also fraught with difficulty and inconsistency, differing state by state in what they require, what they cost and what they confer;
83 Declares the deeper ground of that call. The polities from which our ancestors were trafficked were not the states that occupy those territories today, so a claim addressed to any one present-day state cannot answer where we came from. And our lineages are themselves Pan-African: many of us carry the ancestry of numerous African peoples, brought together by the very processes that dispersed us. We are not required to select one strand of who we are in order to be recognised. That our peoplehood was reconstituted across those lineages is among the things our people accomplished under conditions designed to destroy us, and a Pan-African citizenship would recognise in law
84 Affirms that such a citizenship would confer rights of entry, residence, work, participation and political voice across the African world, giving practical effect to Article 3(q) of the Constitutive Act and to the Abuja Proclamation of 1993, which exhorts all African States to grant rights of entry and residence to all persons of African descent. We hold it to be itself a reparatory measure, restoring the belonging and freedom of movement destroyed under the Maangamizi; and we ask that it be developed with the
85 Calls upon African Union and CARICOM member states and institutions to recognise the formations, lineages, organisers and leading luminaries who have carried this work in Europe intergenerationally, and to build with them rather than passing over them for institutional players; and observes that in passing over them they weaken the very footing
86 Notes that institutional knowledge of the African diaspora is concentrated on North America, and that our formations, histories and analyses in Europe are correspondingly less known; and calls upon states and institutions to undertake the work of learning about the African diaspora in Europe as a condition of engaging it, since we know both the societies in which we live and, in many cases, those from which we came or were
87 Identifies a gap in international standards that directly harms us. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (A/RES/61/295) establishes, at Article 18, the right of a people to participate in decision-making on matters affecting it through representatives chosen by itself, and at Article 19 the duty of states to obtain its free, prior and informed consent. No corollary standard exists for Africans and people of African descent, including in the draft declaration on the rights of African people. Our right to representation is therefore unrecognised in the very processes now determining
88 Declares accordingly that what we assert is the right to self-representation, and not inclusion in processes designed without us; and calls for that right to be recognised in all future summits, conferences and processes concerning reparations and people of African descent. Accreditation requires close attention, so that organised constituencies holding mandates are accredited rather than only individuals already known to convenors — the formations named in this Statement, and the Europe Pan-African Forum for People of
89 Declares what self-representation requires in practice, so that it does not rest as a principle alone. It requires decentralised community systems of representation, through which community members and residents participate actively in reparations processes and mandate those who speak for them; representatives accountable to positions their communities have settled, and subject to direction, redirection and recall; and our own organs — assemblies, commissions of inquiry and tribunals — through which those positions are formed. The same logic reaches who sets the rules: the trade imbalances, the inherited colonial arrangements and the unjust debts that hold African development back also disable self-representation at every level, and a right to represent ourselves that
90 Calls for minimum standards of engagement, grounded in our own knowledge systems and measured against the ladder of participation, to govern all dealings between states, institutions and African heritage communities; and declares consultation without decision-making power to fall below that minimum; 9191 Records as a concrete expression of self-representation the demand for an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice (APPCITARJ) in the United Kingdom, and for equivalent commissions across Europe. It is a campaign initiative of the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign, founded within the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe. It is supported by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations in the United Kingdom, by the Green Party of England and Wales, and by countless other constituencies. Its recommendations are to be authoritative and actionable, and it is a community-led mechanism in which the communities harmed establish the truth of their own experience; and calls upon African and Caribbean states, European states, churches and institutions to recognise and
F. Participation and integrity
The standards by which engagement with our communities is to be conducted.
92 Recalls the INOSAAR Principles of Participation, and in particular their treatment of the asymmetrical power relations at work between those operating within elite institutions and the grassroots formations engaged in reparations;
93 Extends that principle beyond the academy, to where it is now most needed. State actors, representatives of the African Union and of CARICOM member states, officials of the United Nations and of its organs and mechanisms, and those holding office in funding, cultural and educational institutions all carry into a room the standing of the bodies they serve. Where our communities are present in that room, our formations carry none. That asymmetry operates whether or not anyone intends it, and we ask that it be
94 Records what follows where that asymmetry goes unacknowledged. The confidence of grassroots formations is swayed; their agendas are redirected; their long-standing positions are displaced and their vocabulary set aside — by the weight of the office from which an intervention comes rather than by the strength of its reasoning. We have observed this repeatedly, and we name it because naming it is the means available to us of
95 Calls for an egalitarian space for exchange in every forum concerning reparations. Positions should be weighed on their reasoning and not on the standing of those advancing them. Grassroots formations should be resourced to participate on equal terms. And no position long held by our communities should be altered without those communities agreeing to it; 96 Adopts the Protocols of Engagement Between Reparations Communities, annexed to this Statement as an evolution of the INOSAAR Principles of Participation and The Hague RootsSynergy Declaration, governing how any actor — state, intergovernmental body, institution, funder or movement formation — engages the reparations community of a country or region that is not its own; and declares that these Protocols bind us as they bind
97 Records the substance of those Protocols, so that what is adopted is legible from this Statement alone. They require any actor entering the reparations community of a country or region not its own to prepare before engaging and to inform itself of the organising already under way; to approach through the formations that constituency recognises, and not through those most convenient to it; to state the standing on which it speaks and the mandate it holds; to attribute the analysis and terminology it uses; to leave the constituency's own positions and vocabulary intact; and to account afterwards for what was done with what it took. They provide for breach to be recorded and published, and they bind those adopting this Statement as they bind those it addresses;
98 Affirms substantive representation over descriptive representation. Descriptive representation asks who is in the room, and rests upon shared identity markers. Substantive representation asks who decided they should be there, who can remove
direct, redirect and recall those who speak for them. Descriptive representation without substantive representation is co-optation. Identity is not the qualification; mandate is;
99 Requires that any actor engaging a reparations community first inform itself of the historiography of reparations organising in the country or region concerned, and approach those who have carried that work. Where this is not done, organisers are passed over, and elite capture, movement capture, state capture, NGOisation, co-optation and reparationswashing follow;
G. Toward what repair is directed
The principles that would govern a repaired world, and how we apply them.
100 Affirms that repair has a purpose beyond the cessation of harm, and that the purpose should be stated. What is sought is not a return to a condition preceding the Maangamizi, which cannot be recovered, nor the admission of African peoples upon equal terms into arrangements built from our dispossession. It is a world ordered differently;
101 Declares the principles by which such a world would be ordered. That political belonging is constituted through community, and that a people may govern itself without holding a territory of its own. That authority is exercised through participation rather than delegated upward and exercised over those who delegated it. That a society is judged by the quality of its relationships — among its people, between its generations, and between its people and the land, waters and other living beings — and not by what it accumulates. That plurality is the condition of coexistence, both among peoples, each ordering its life on its own terms, and within a people, whose own multiplicity is not to be flattened into uniformity. And that the sovereignty of all peoples rests upon the sovereignty of the earth,
102 Records that these principles are drawn from the knowledge foundations set out in Part One. Belonging constituted through community follows from Ubuntu, where personhood itself is constituted through relation. The judging of a society by its relationships follows from Ukama and Seriti. The obligation to remake a damaged world follows from Serudj Ta. And the weighing of any framework, policy or settlement against whether balance is restored follows from Ma'at;
103 Affirms that one interpretation of these principles is already advanced within our movements, and records it as such. The Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, the Global Afrikan People's Parliament and the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign advocate Maatubuntuman: a self-repaired African world constituted as a Pan-African union of communities, holding together Ma'at, the holistic justice of Kemet; Ubuntu, the communion of humanity; and man, thecAkan conception of egalitarian polity. Membership is held by communities rather than by territorial states, which is what distinguishes it from a federation of the states colonialism left. Its constituent communities are the Maatubuntujamaas, wherever African people are, including in Europe, and the Sankofahomes on the continent are its spaces of return;
104 Affirms that those same formations advance Ubuntudunia: the wider world in which such a polity could live without domination, in which many peoples coexist on their own terms. That formulation reaches further than the argument now being had about multipolarity, since a world of several hegemons remains a world of hegemony;
105 Records that interpretation without adopting it as the settled position of this convening, and that other formulations of the same principles are advanced elsewhere within our movements. Other peoples will likewise name their own repair in their own terms, as is their right, and our solidarity with them is mutual support in self-determined repair;
106 Declares that these principles are the measure against which our asks are to be read. Every ask in Part Three is a step toward a world so ordered, and not a substitute for it. A state may meet all of them and the world remain as it is;
What the Maangamizi consists of in Europe today, and what we ask of the African Union and CARICOM, the states of Europe, the Holy See and the international institutions.
H. The Maangamizi as it operates in Europe today
What is being done to us here now, and what cessation therefore requires.
107 Records what the Maangamizi consists of in Europe today, so that the obligation of cessation has a determinate object. The harms recorded in this section are not legacies of a closed history. They are the present operation of the continuum, and each of them is
108 Records further that African heritage communities in Europe are subject to racialised policing, disproportionate stop and search, deaths in custody and in police contact, and criminalisation from childhood; to immigration, detention and deportation regimes that separate families and remove people to countries they have never known; to disproportionate exclusion from schooling and the misdiagnosis and misplacement of our children; to disparities in maternal mortality, in mental health detention and in access to treatment; to discrimination in housing, employment and credit; to the surveillance and criminalisation of our organising; and to the routine denigration of African peoples in
109 Records also that these harms compound across a lifetime and across generations, and that they fall differently upon African women and girls, upon African men and boys, upon disabled people, upon those without secure immigration status, and upon those living in poverty;
110 Declares that no framework addressing reparations in Europe can be judged adequate while these harms continue, and that their cessation is a matter of reparatory justice. Equality, diversity and inclusion policy cannot reach it. Such policy addresses distribution within existing arrangements — who is recruited, who is promoted, who is represented — while leaving those arrangements, and the accumulation on which they rest, untouched. It treats the harm as unequal treatment rather than as a continuing crime, offers inclusion where restitution is owed, and requires nothing of those enriched by the Maangamizi. We do not decline such measures. We record that they are not reparations, and that a state may satisfy every equality duty it has legislated while owing us everything
111 Undertakes to document these harms, to publish what we find, and to hold each European state to what is done within its own jurisdiction;
I. Impact of Resolution A/80/L.48 in Europe
What the Resolution opens, and what we undertake to do with it here.
112 Recognises that Resolution A/80/L.48 creates a formal political record to which states can be held in subsequent advocacy, diplomatic and legal processes, and that its principal obstacles are its non-binding character and the doctrine of intertemporality, by
113 Resolves that the formations adopting this Statement will advance the Pan-African counter-argument to intertemporality from our own standpoint in Europe, as a geopolitical constituency of the African diaspora in our own right. That argument rests upon the continuing character of the Maangamizi and upon African jurisprudence, under under which time cannot alter the truth of what occurred;
114 Resolves to carry the Resolution into the parliaments, courts, institutions, media and community spaces of the European states in which we live, this being the work no African or Caribbean state can undertake on our behalf; 115 Calls upon those European states that abstained to state their reasons publicly, and to recognise, engage and learn from the African heritage communities and formations resident in their jurisdictions on the substance of the Resolution and on what its implementation would require;
J. The African Union's Sixth Region
Our claim within the African Union's Sixth Region, and what we ask of the Union.
116 Affirms that African heritage communities in Europe are organised as African people, through our own formations across the Europe Region and through the African Union African Diaspora Sixth Region High Council. We claim our place within the Sixth Region as such formations. It is one framework through which we pursue our purposes, and our
117 Records that the practical work of operationalising the Sixth Region is already under way and is being driven by our own formations, and calls for that work, and those driving it, to be recognised and resourced rather than restated as a task for others; and holds that where states and institutions lack a template for participation, ours may be examined, our
118 Calls upon the African Union to hold itself to its own commitment to the Sixth Region; to advance the Sixth Region Diaspora Advisory Board; and to ensure that the common African position on reparations and the African Reparatory Programme of Action are developed with the substantive participation of African heritage communities in Europe. That participation should run through the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) and the Citizens and Diaspora Directorate (CIDO), with a mechanism by which our communities may contribute to and revise the work of the Committee of
119 Calls upon CARICOM and its Reparations Commission to engage African heritage communities in Europe on the basis of the Protocols annexed to this Statement, and to accompany the revised Ten Point Plan, wherever it is carried into wider frameworks, with an explicit statement of the constituencies it does and does not speak for;
K. Magnifica Humanitas and the Holy See
What the acknowledgment of the Holy See opens, and what remains owed.
120 Welcomes the acknowledgment of the role of the Roman Catholic Church offered by Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas as an opening, and notes that it is a plea for pardon
121 Calls upon the Holy See to carry that acknowledgment to its conclusion: to name and formally revoke the papal bulls by which the enslavement and dispossession of African peoples were licensed — Dum Diversas of 1452, Romanus Pontifex of 1455 and Inter Caetera of 1493 — going beyond the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery issued in March 2023; to open the Vatican archives on enslavement and colonisation to African researchers; to return the African ancestral remains and sacred works held in Roman Catholic Church collections; to offer an unconditional apology accompanied by guarantees of non-repetition and a commitment to reparations; and to engage the
L. Restitution and the return of what was taken
Our ancestral works and our ancestors' remains, and the terms of their return.
122 Affirms that much of what was taken from us is not property but ancestral: works held in our traditions as bearing the presence of our ancestors, sacred works made for ritual and governance, and the remains of our ancestors themselves. The Benin Bronzes are among them: commemorative and altar works representing our ancestors, cast from manillas exchanged for the bodies of our ancestors. This Statement names them
123 Recalls the instruments governing the return of cultural property: the UNESCO Convention of 1970 on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property; the UNIDROIT Convention of 1995 on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects; the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin, established in 1978; Article 12 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, on the right to the repatriation of human remains; the Sarr–Savoy report of 2018; the Common African Position on the Restitution of African
124 Recalls the instruments governing the return of cultural property: the UNESCO Convention of 1970 on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property; the UNIDROIT Convention of 1995 on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects; the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin, established in 1978; Article 12 of the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, on the right to the repatriation of human remains; the Sarr–Savoy report of 2018; the Common African Position on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage of 2023;
125 Demands in respect of ancestral remains, that every European state conduct an audit of the African ancestral remains held in its museums, universities, medical schools, teaching collections and private hands, and publish that audit; and that a return protocol be developed with the communities and lineages concerned. Our ancestors are not cultural property, and their return is not a matter of heritage policy;
126 Records that restitution is not a simple case of return, and this Statement declines to treat it as one. The Restitution Study Group counts members among the formations represented here and has now established an entity in the United Kingdom. It holds that ancestral works made from the proceeds of the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans carry an interest belonging to the descendants of the enslaved, the Benin Bronzes having been cast from manilla ingots exchanged for our ancestors. On that argument, return absent acknowledgment and accounting by any party implicated risks conferring benefit upon those who profited. We record that argument as one our
127 Records further that the question to whom our ancestral works return is as consequential as whether they return. The Benin ancestral works looted in the British punitive expedition of 1897 began to be returned from 2022; in March 2023 an executive order of the outgoing President of Nigeria vested title, control and management of all returned works in the person of the Oba of Benin rather than in the national museum service, without the returning museums or the Nigerian museum authorities being party
128 Affirms the right of the descendants of those trafficked to explore, study, learn from and stand in relationship with our own heritage. That right is denied in practice across Europe. Our ancestral works, sacred works and our ancestors' remains are held in museums, university and medical collections, libraries, archives and private hands — much of it uncatalogued, unpublished and never displayed — in the very cities where our communities live. Access is a question distinct from custody, and it is owed to us now,
129 Calls upon every European state and institution holding African collections to undertake and publish full provenance research; to catalogue and digitise those holdings and make them accessible at no cost to African heritage communities; to provide access for descendant communities to study, to teach and to hold ceremony; to place curation
African heritage organisations and formations to carry out that work, rather than having it done about us;
130 Declares that this is a Pan-African matter, and that we decline the dichotomy in which it is commonly posed — a contest between retaining our ancestral works in Western institutions so that descendants in the diaspora may see them, and returning them to African states. Both leave our heritage in the hands of parties other than our peoples, and both set continental and diasporic Africans against one another as rival claimants. We are one people. What we seek are arrangements serving the relationship between us: shared stewardship, circulation among African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora, reciprocal loans, joint interpretation, and the building of our own institutions to hold what
131 Calls for a restitution protocol addressing the question to whom our ancestral works return: identifying all who hold an interest in an ancestral work, including African heritage and other descendant communities in the diaspora where its making or acquisition is bound up with the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans; requiring the full history of each work to be told wherever it is held; requiring acknowledgment and accounting by any party implicated in that trafficking before title passes to it; and providing for shared stewardship, access and interpretation where interests are held by more than one community. We recommend that this be developed with the Restitution Study Group UK and with other movement formations working on questions of restitution, and adopted alongside the Protocols annexed to this Statement;
M. Knowledge, data and the education of our children
Language, curriculum, digital sovereignty and the conditions of knowing. 131 Recognises and celebrates Re-PAIR — Reparations as Pan-Afrikan Indigenous Repairs — the groundbreaking research programme developed by the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations, supported by the European Research Council, hosted at the University of Liverpool and commencing in September 2026, with the Maangamizi Educational Trust (MET) among its community partners. Re-PAIR researches the practice of repair: what is being done to repair the transgenerational damage inflicted upon African peoples, what reparatory models grassroots and Indigenous communities are creating, and how African heritage communities are challenging prevailing thinking about reparations. It documents from practice how Africans on the continent and in the diaspora engage in self-repair, or rematriation, by creating cultural, spiritual, ecological and pedagogic spaces in which to return to and
132 Records that its research spans Benin and Ghana in West Africa; the Guianas and Belize in the Caribbean; and France and the United Kingdom in Europe. It centres
cognitive justice, the equity of all knowledges, and blurs the boundary between academic scholarship and community-based action research. That research of this ambition is being led from Europe, by a network grounded in the organising of our own formations, is itself a contribution of the African diaspora in Europe to the international field;
133 Records that its research spans Benin and Ghana in West Africa; the Guianas and Belize in the Caribbean; and France and the United Kingdom in Europe. It centres cognitive justice, the equity of all knowledges, and blurs the boundary between academic scholarship and community-based action research. That research of this ambition is being led from Europe, by a network grounded in the organising of our own formations, is itself a contribution of the African diaspora in Europe to the international field;
134 Affirms Pan-African Indigenous Repairs: that dispossession and dispersal did not extinguish the African indigeneity of our peoples. We retain our indigenous African relationships to land, our knowledge systems, our cosmologies and our ancestral traditions, which the perpetrators of the Maangamizi sought to destroy and which reparatory justice must restore; and declares this to be a claim we make in our own right, including upon African and Caribbean states, for recognition of our historicity and our Pan-African orientation;
135 Affirms the right of children of African heritage and ancestry in Europe to learn their own histories, languages, cosmologies and spiritual traditions within the school systems of the states in which they live; and calls upon European states to place the Maangamizi, African civilisations before and beyond it, and the histories of African presence and resistance within and beyond Europe among the required topics of the compulsory curriculum. These should be designed and taught with African heritage communities, and the supplementary schools that have carried this work for generations should be resourced;
136 Asserts digital and data sovereignty as a dimension of reparatory justice. Our languages, oral traditions, music, images, archives and ancestral records are being digitised, aggregated and used to train computational systems, largely without our consent, our participation or any share in what is generated. The digitised record of our own history is being made the property of those who scanned it. We assert that African peoples hold rights over the collection, storage, use and licensing of data concerning them and their heritage;
137 Calls upon states, institutions, archives and technology companies to obtain the free, prior and informed consent of the African heritage communities concerned before digitising, licensing or training systems upon African heritage material; to place digitised African collections under community-governed access terms rather than proprietary once; and to ensure that African peoples share in any value generated from them. And we record that scientific and technological
capacity is itself a reparatory question: any measure leaving the monopoly of science and technology untouched leaves the balance of power where it stands;
N. Confronting Afrophobia/Afriphobia
A continuing harm of the Maangamizi, and the terms in which it is named. 138 Records that Afrophobia is the term in common international usage. At the international level Civil Society agreed to the term at the 2009 Civil Society Forum for the Durban Review Conference. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent adopted the Afrophobia term in 2011. It has been used in Human Rights Council and General Assembly resolutions. And it has been advanced into the draft United Nations Declaration on the Promotion, Protection and Full Respect of the Human Rights of People of African Descent. That draft is elaborated under General Assembly resolution A/RES/76/226 by the Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, with the contribution of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent and of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. Its inclusion there was secured through sustained advocacy. This Statement uses the term, and welcomes that it has advanced;
139 Records that the European Union (EU) High Level Panel Group (2018) in their Paper “acknowledging and understanding the challenged to ensure effective responses” the term Afrophobia was considered being excepted, referring to official statements by, among others, the Council of Europe High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent. Considering the term as the specificities of racism that targets people of African descent; generally understood as the manifestation of racism towards Black people, intended as all those individuals, groups and communities that define themselves as 'Black'.
140 Records further the European Network Against Racism’s explanation of the term Afrophobia as “a specific form of racism that refers to any act of violence or discrimination including racist hate speech, fueled by historical abuses and negative stereotyping, and leading to the exclusion and dehumanisation of people of African descent. It can take many forms: dislike, bias, oppression, racism and structural and institutional discrimination, among others”. Accordingly, Afrophobia can be seen as “the result of the social construction of race to which generic and/or cultural specificities and stereotypes are attributed (racialization)” which “is deeply embedded in the collective European imagination and continues to impact the lives of people of African descent and Black Europeans”.
141 Records the distinction from which Afriphobia arises, as a matter of education rather than of preference. In Britain and across much of the rest of Europe some communities name themselves African, and Afriphobia follows from that naming. Whereother terms are used elsewhere, they arise from other histories and are for those communities to determine. For them Afriphobia names the harm precisely. The European Parliament resolution of 26 March 2019 recognises Afrophobia and Afriphobia together, alongside anti-Black racism, as denoting one specific form of racism; The European Network of People of African Descent used Afriphobia
Declares that the right of a people to name itself, affirmed above, extends to naming the harm 142 done to it. Where communities have named that harm in their own terms, the naming is to be respected rather than harmonised away. This Statement therefore carries Afrophobia and Afriphobia together, and asks that both be carried ininternational texts, so that each community's own naming of the harm it suffers is present in them;
143 Records a pattern our communities encounter, and set it down without rancour because it is structural. People of African descent holding office within powerful institutions, in Europe and beyond, sometimes use that position to withhold supportfrom the campaigns, the vocabulary and the self-determined advocacy of the African heritage communities from which they come, and to cast them as illegitimate. In Europe this is particularly consequential, because we are unrepresented by states and must represent ourselves; an objection raised from within an institution can delay a community position that long predates it. We ask that those holding such office stand upon the knowledge their communities have produced, and that they do not use their position to redefine what those communities have defined for themselves. This is the asymmetry of power described above, operating within our own ranks;
144 Records a pattern our communities encounter, and set it down without rancour because it is structural. People of African descent holding office within powerful institutions, in Europe and beyond, sometimes use that position to withhold support from the campaigns, the vocabulary and the self-determined advocacy of the African heritage communities from which they come, and to cast them as illegitimate. In Europe this is particularly consequential, because we are unrepresented by states and must represent ourselves; an objection raised from within an institution can delay a community position that long predates it. We ask that those holding such office stand upon the knowledge their communities have produced, and that they do not use their position to redefine what those communities have defined for themselves. This is the asymmetry of power described above, operating within our own ranks;
145 Affirms that Afrophobia (Afriphobia — anti-African racism) across European states — is a continuing harm of the Maangamizi and therefore a matter of reparatory justice rather than of equalities policy alone; that it operates structurally and materially in policing, immigration and deportation regimes, labour markets, housing, health, education and public discourse; and that its recognition in the European Parliament resolution of 2019 has been followed by limited implementation;
Recalls that the European Parliament resolution of 26 March 2019 already146 committed the European institutions and Member States to a substantial programme. We press four of its commitments in particular: the declassification of colonial archives; steps toward meaningful and effective redress, which that resolution states may include some form of reparations, public apologies and the restitution of stolen artefacts; the inclusion of the history of people of African descent in national curricula; and increased financial support at European, national and local level for grassroots organizations;
Notes with concern that these commitments have seen limited implementation; 147 that the histories of injustice which that resolution itself described as largely unrecognised and unaccounted for at institutional level remain so; that recognition of Afrophobia/Afriphobia by European states remains limited; and that the two International Decades for People of African Descent have received little recognition from European states, and little of the resourcing that would allow them to operate at the scale the work requires;
148 Calls upon the European Commission, the European Parliament and Member States to report publicly on implementation of the 2019 resolution, commitment by commitment. We ask for a timetable for the outstanding items, in particular the declassification of colonial archives, the restitution of stolen artefacts, redress for past injustices, and the increased funding of grassroots organisations of people of African descent;
149 Notes that our formations cite the 2019 resolution while maintaining our objection to its use of the term slave trade, which we hold to be inadequate to what was done to Africans who were trafficked and enslaved;
150 Adopts a shared Afrophobia/Afriphobia advocacy agenda for the Europe Region, informed by the deliberations of this convening and by the documentation already produced by our formations across the participating countries;
151 Reaffirms the call, made repeatedly by the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, by the European Parliament in its resolution of 2019 and by our own formations, for the collection and publication of data disaggregated by racial and ethnic origin; and records that European states continue to fail to count and record people of African descent accurately, and as distinct from other racialised groups, with the result that our numbers, our conditions and the discrimination we face cannot be established from official sources;
152 Declares that this statistical invisibility is not a technical shortcoming. It obstructs the evidencing of Afrophobia/Afriphobia, the design of remedies and the assessment of any state's performance; and it is therefore itself a continuing harm requiring repair;
153 Calls upon European states to give full effect to their obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; to collect and publish equality data on a basis of self-identification which counts later generations; and to address Afrophobia/Afriphobia in policing, immigration and deportation regimes, labour markets, housing, health and education;
154 Calls upon the European institutions to act on paragraph 27 of the 2019 resolution by liaising with the African Union, the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Council of Europe on Afrophobia/Afriphobia. That liaison should include the organised African diaspora formations of Europe, and not be conducted between institutions alone;
Our own coordination, our advocacy and education, and the terms on which we hold ourselves to this Statement.
O. Harmonising our voices and strengthening shared capacity
Coordination, resourcing, and who carries this Statement forward. 155 Affirms that the reparations demand is intergenerational, and undertakes to ensure the full participation of young people in the formations carrying it forward: in our decision-making, our delegations and our leadership. We undertake to resource their own formations rather than to speak on their behalf, and to transmit what we know without requiring that it be received unchanged;
156 Affirms the standing of our elders, whose knowledge of this struggle is the record of it, and undertakes to document what they carry while they are with us;
157 Records that this Statement is made by the formations adopting it, and carries the mandate they hold. Many within our communities are not represented here, among them disabled people, those without secure immigration status, those living in poverty and those in detention. We undertake to build the organising through which they speak for themselves, and to widen who is present at our convenings;
158 Recognises that we have come to Europe from across the whole continent of Africa, from the Caribbean, from the Americas and from elsewhere, arriving in different periods and under different conditions; and that harmonising our voices across that diversity is itself substantial work, which our formations undertake and which no state can undertake on our behalf;
159 Entrusts the follow-up and coordination of this Outcome Statement to the Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent (EPAF-PAD), as convenor of this Dialogue, together with the European Pan-African Congress for Reparatory Justice (EPAC-RJ); supported by the National Platform Dutch Slavery Past, the National Reparations Commission of the Netherlands (NARECO-NL), the National Institute for Dutch Slavery Past and Legacy (NiNsee), the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe (PARCOE), the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign and its educational arm the Maangamizi Educational Trust (MET), the Europe-Wide NGO Consultative Council for Afrikan Reparations (ENGOCCAR), the African Union African Diaspora Sixth Region High Council (AUADS), the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations (INOSAAR), and the country chapters of the Europe Region — so that this work is carried by formations already constituted rather than by any new body;
160 Encourages every organisation, formation and individual participating in this Dialogue, and every African heritage formation across the Europe Region, to implement this Outcome Statement within their own organising; and declares that the naming of coordinating bodies places no limitation upon who may carry it forward;
161 Decides to hold our own record — our declarations, positions and archive — published and citable by African heritage communities, so that what we have set down cannot be rewritten later by anyone, ourselves included;
162 Declares that the wealth held by the foundations, endowments, corporations and institutions of Europe was accumulated from the Maangamizi — from the land, labour, bodies and resources of African peoples. A transfer from such a body to our formations is therefore the restitution of our peoples' resources, returning to us a portion of what was taken. Such a transfer discharges an obligation. It is neither a gift nor a favour, and no credit accrues to the party making it;
163 Calls upon funders and philanthropic institutions to act upon that understanding. Reckon with the origins of the wealth held; acknowledge those origins publicly; be accountable to the communities from whom it came rather than requiring those communities to account to you; and make reparation. Resourcing the infrastructure of our movements, so that African heritage communities can pursue the priorities they have set for themselves and build the capacity to do so, is one form that reparation takes;
164 Requires that such restitution be governed accordingly: no conditions placed upon our analysis; no reporting arrangement by which those who owe hold to account those to whom it is owed; decision-making held by community governance rather than consultation upon decisions already taken; and acknowledgment on the record that what is transferred is made against a debt. And records that the constraint under which our formations have organised is itself a continuing harm of the Maangamizi;
165 Undertakes to continue sensitisation and conscientisation work with institutions entering this field, and records that our formations presently carry that work largely unpaid;
P. Concrete strategies and steps forward
The positions we adopt, the briefing we prepare and the roadmap we follow.
166 Resolves upon the concrete work the formations adopting this Statement will carry in the twenty-four months following its adoption: to press the asks set out in the Schedule of Asks annexed to this Statement with each addressee named there, and to publish what is answered and what is not; to pursue the audit and return of African ancestral remains held in European collections, beginning with those states where our formations are
formations are already engaged; to build the evidence base on Afrophobia/Afriphobia and on the absence of disaggregated equality data; to advance the APPCITARJ in the United Kingdom and equivalent commissions elsewhere in Europe; to develop the restitution protocol with the formations working on restitution; to convene our own assemblies and organs of inquiry; and to establish the register of adopting formations and the annual review;
167 Adopts agreed core positions on reparatory justice for the African diaspora in Europe, and a prioritised set of asks for the African Union, informed by the deliberations of this convening and the continuing work of our formations;
168 Requests the preparation of a briefing document for the African Union and CARICOM carrying these positions and asks, including the operationalisation of the Sixth Region;
169 Adopts a twenty-four month engagement roadmap beginning with the reparations movements' own communities and formations, and proceeding thereafter to engagement with the African Union through the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) and the Citizens and Diaspora Directorate (CIDO), with CARICOM, and with the European states concerned;
170 Calls upon European states, and the Kingdom of the Netherlands as host of this Dialogue, to offer full and formal apology accompanied by guarantees of non-repetition; to support the APPCITARJ and equivalent Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice as legitimate expressions of civil society; to open their archives; and to return ancestral remains and cultural heritage;
Q. Advocacy and education for implementation
How this Statement is to be taught, used, resourced and reported upon.
171 Affirms reparations Afriliteracy as a condition of effecting and securing reparations: the capacity of African peoples to read, understand and act upon the reparations demand in its full depth — its history and historiography, its jurisprudence, its terminology, its political economy, and the African traditions in which it stands. The struggle of African peoples cannot be reduced to soundbites. It requires deep study, learning, reflection and assessment of all that has gone before, and what we seek cannot be pursued without it;
172 Declares that the length of this Statement follows from the depth of what is at stake. Centuries of harm across every dimension of life, and a body of analysis built over generations, do not compress into a page. We ask that it be read as any instrument of consequence is read, and we undertake to make its provisions accessible without reducing them;
173 Undertakes to build that Afriliteracy through mass sensitisation, conscientisation, mobilisation and organisation: sensitisation, so that African heritage communities know what is at stake; conscientisation, so that they understand how it came to be, and whose interests are served by leaving it as it is; mobilisation, so that they act; and organisation, so that the action holds beyond the moment;
174 Declares that a statement which is not taught is a statement which sits on a shelf. This Statement carries obligations we have placed upon ourselves, and it will be implemented to the extent that African heritage communities know it, understand it and use it. We take responsibility for that work rather than assigning it to others;
175 Undertakes to produce the materials by which this Statement can be used: a short guide to its provisions and to their application; briefings for formations engaging states, institutions and funders; the Schedule of Asks in a form each addressee and each formation can work from; and accessible versions for those who will not read the full text;
176 Undertakes to carry this Statement into our own educational practice — through action-learning circles, the Groundings, the people's assemblies, the supplementary and weekend schools, and the community education our formations already conduct — so that its provisions are held by the African heritage communities they concern and not by those who represent them alone. A community that knows what is being advocated in its name is able to hold to account those advocating it;
177 Undertakes to develop training for those who represent our communities in state and institutional forums, in the annexed Protocols and the standards this Statement sets, so that our representatives arrive carrying positions our communities have settled rather than positions they have formed alone;
178 Undertakes to commission translation of this Statement and its annexes into the languages of the Europe Region, and to treat those translations as equally authoritative, since a Statement issued in one language reaches only part of the constituency it speaks with;
179 Calls upon funders, institutions and states engaging with this Statement to resource that advocacy and education on the same footing, as the restitution of our peoples' resources rather than as support given. Our formations otherwise carry it unpaid, after their own working hours, as they have carried this demand for generations;
180 Decides to report at each annual convening on what has been done to implement this Statement, by whom and with what result, and to publish that report alongside the review, so that implementation is measured rather than assumed;
R. Follow-up, review and transmission
What happens next, and how we hold ourselves to it.
181 Establishes a register of formations adopting this Outcome Statement and the Protocols annexed to it. Adoption is by declaration to the coordinating bodies named above, and the register shall be published and maintained, so that the phrase the formations adopting this Statement has a determinate referent and so that non-adoption is a position capable of being stated and defended;
182 Invites every state, institution and funder to whom this Statement is transmitted to engage with it and to respond; and decides that responses received, and the absence of a response, will be recorded in our annual review together with any reply. We record what was said and what was not;
183 Decides to review implementation of this Outcome Statement at our next annual convening, against the annexed Protocols and the standards this Statement sets, and to publish that review;
184 Decides that dissent from any part of this Outcome Statement shall be recorded in the words of those dissenting and published alongside it;
185 Resolves to guard against embedding in our own coordination structures the weaknesses we identify in others, by recognising historicity, distinguishing movement formations from institutional ones, and holding our own leadership accountable to communities rather than to conveners;
186 Requests the transmission of this Outcome Statement to the African Union, to CARICOM, to the governments of the European states in which our communities live, to the Holy See, and to the relevant United Nations mechanisms including the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent and the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent;
187 Declares that we, as African heritage communities in Europe, are one African people with the continent and the rest of the diaspora; that being unrepresented by the African and Caribbean states whose citizenship many of us hold, we are compelled to represent ourselves — within Europe, and in advocating our rights and interests beyond it, since this non-recognition reaches the Caribbean and the Americas also; that we determine what would constitute our repair and when it has been achieved; that engagement with existing states and institutions is a means to repair — never its measure, and never the whole of it; and that every process, policy, framework and institution addressing reparations is to be judged by whether it advances that repair.
APPENDIX: Schedule of ASKS by Addressee Glossary of Terms and Concepts
Annexes to The Hague Outcome Statement on Participatory Reparatory Justice · third draft · Annex A groups every ask by the body it addresses, with the clause it comes from · Annex B explains the terms used
How to use these annexes
The Statement runs to one hundred and eighty-seven clauses. Annex A gathers the Asks by addressee, with the clause number against each, so that any and all interested parties can find what concerns it and any formation can work from a list rather than from the whole text. Each section may be extracted and transmitted on its own.
What we undertake ourselves is set out first. The Statement asks nothing of others that it does not ask of us, and the order of this Schedule reflects that.
Annex B explains every African term the Statement uses, and the legal and technical terms that carry weight in it. A reader who meets an unfamiliar concept can find its meaning here without leaving the document.
ANNEX A — Schedule of ASKS by addressee
A1. What we undertake ourselves
– Adopt and be bound by the annexed Protocols of Engagement, and accept
accountability under them. [90]
– Hold our own record — declarations, positions and archive — published and citable by African heritage communities. [155]
– Maintain the register of adopting formations. [175]
– Ensure the full participation of young people in our formations, resource their own formations, and document our elders' testimonies while they are with us. [149, 150]
– Build the organisational capacity to enable those not yet represented to speak for themselves, and to be fully included in all of our convenings. [151]
– Document the harms set out in Section H, publish what we find, and hold each European state to account for what is done within its own jurisdiction. [109]
– Produce the materials by which this Statement can be used, carry it into our own educational practice, and develop training for those who represent our communities. [169, 170, 171]
– Guard against embedding in our own coordination structures the weaknesses we identify in others. [179]
– Report at each annual convening on what has been done to implement this Statement, by whom and with what result. [174]
A2. The Africa Union – Hold the Union to its own commitment to the Sixth Region; advance the Sixth Region Diaspora Advisory Board; and develop the common African position on reparations and the African Reparatory Programme of Action with the substantive participation of African heritage communities in Europe, through ECOSOCC and CIDO, with a mechanism by whichour communities may contribute to and revise the work of the Committee of Experts on Reparations and the Reference Group of Legal Experts. [112]
– Give effect to Decision Assembly/AU/Dec.934(XXXVIII) in the common African position, in the work of the Union’s organs, and in every forum in which reparations are determined. [21]
– Establish diaspora voting rights and diaspora parliamentary representation for citizens abroad, as Cape Verde, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and the Dominican Republic already provide, and do so as a matter of reparatory justice rather than of administrative convenience. [74]
– Develop a Pan-African citizenship, alongside the citizenships of particular African and Caribbean states, with the participation of the diaspora communities it concerns. [76, 78]
– Recognise the formations, lineages, organisers and leading luminaries who have carried this work in Europe intergenerationally, and build with them rather than passing over them for institutional players / neophytes. [79]
– Receive the briefing document carrying our agreed core positions and prioritised Asks. [162]
A3. CARICOM and its Reparations Commission
– Engage African heritage communities in Europe on the basis of the Protocols annexed
to the Statement, and accompany the revised Ten Point Plan, wherever it is carried into
wider frameworks, with an explicit statement of the constituencies it does and does not
speak for. [113]
– Establish diaspora voting rights and parliamentary representation — noting that Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados are among the states most active on reparations and enfranchise no part of their diaspora. [74, 75]
– Cease to treat citizenship as conferring a mandate to represent communities living elsewhere, and obtain a mandate through our own organisations and formations before speaking on matters affecting us. [63, 66]
A4. European states – Offer full and formal apology accompanied by guarantees of non-repetition. [164]
– State publicly the reasons for abstention on Resolution A/80/L.48, and recognise, engage and learn from the African heritage communities and formations resident in the jurisdiction. [109]
– Support the APPCITARJ and equivalent Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice as legitimate expressions of civil society. [164]
– Open and declassify colonial archives. [164, 142]
– Conduct and publish an audit of the African ancestral remains held in museums, universities, medical schools, teaching collections and private hands, and develop a return protocol with the communities and lineages concerned. [119]
– Undertake and publish full provenance research on African collections; catalogue and digitise them and make them accessible at no cost to African heritage communities; provide access to study, teach and hold ceremony; place curation and interpretation in those communities’ hands; and resource African heritage organisations and formations to carry out that work. [123]
– Give full effect to obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; collect and publish equality data on a basis of self-identification which counts later generations; and address Afrophobia/Afriphobia in policing, immigration and deportation regimes, labour markets, housing, health and education. [147]
– Place the Maangamizi, African civilisations before and beyond it, and histories of the African presence and resistance within and beyond Europe among the required topics of the compulsory curriculum, designed and taught with African heritage communities, and resource the supplementary schools that have carried this work for generations. [130]
– Cease the harms set out in Section H, each of which is capable of being stopped. [105, 106, 108]
A5. The European institutions – Report publicly on implementation of the 2019 resolution, commitment by commitment, with a timetable for the outstanding items — in particular the declassification of colonial archives, the restitution of stolen artefacts, redress for past injustices, and increased funding of grassroots organisations of people of African descent. [142]
– Act on paragraph 27 of the 2019 resolution by liaising with the African Union, the United Nations, the OSCE and the Council of Europe on Afrophobia/Afriphobia, including the organised African diaspora formations of Europe in that liaison. [148]
A6. The Holy See
– Name and formally revoke the papal bulls by which the enslavement and dispossession of African peoples were licensed — Dum Diversas of 1452, Romanus Pontifex of 1455 and Inter Caetera of 1493 — going beyond the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery of March 2023 to build on prior decrees condemning enslavement specifically that ratified by Pope Innocent XI in 1686 [115]
– Open the Vatican archives on enslavement and colonisation to African researchers. [115]
– Return the African ancestral remains and sacred works held in Roman Catholic Church collections. [115]
– Offer an unconditional apology with guarantees of non-repetition and a commitment to reparations, and engage the African heritage formations of Europe directly in that work. [115]
A7. Funders, Financial organisatons and philanthropic institutions
– Reckon with the origins of the wealth held; acknowledge those origins publicly; be accountable to the communities from whom it came rather than requiring those communities to account to you; and make reparation. [157]
– Govern such restitution accordingly: no conditions placed upon our analysis; no reporting arrangement by which those who owe hold to account those to whom it is owed; ensure that decision-making IS held by community governance rather than consultation upon decisions already taken; and acknowledgment on the record that what is transferred is made against a debt.[158]
– Resource the advocacy and education by which this Statement is carried, on the same footing. [173]
A8. States, institutions and international bodies generally
– Apply the standard of non-economic loss and damage to African Reparations as it is applied in the climate context; develop with African peoples the methods by which such losses are assessed; and accept that assessment rests with those who sustained the loss. [33]
– Use the terms by which the communities concerned name themselves, and refrain from standardising categories across regions. [60]
– State, when reporting engagement with the African diaspora, which constituencies were engaged, through which formations, and by what mandate. [62]
– Obtain the free, prior and informed consent of the African heritage communities concerned before digitising, licensing or training computational systems upon African heritage material; place digitised African collections under community-governed access terms; and ensure that African peoples share in any value generated. [131]
– Observe the minimum standards of engagement and the Protocols annexed to this Statement, and inform yourself of the historiography of reparations organising in the country or region concerned before engaging it. [84, 93]
– Disaggregate remittance data by sending country and region — addressed to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the African Union and CARICOM. [68]
ANNEX B — Glossary
Terms are given in the form the Statement uses. African terms newly introduced are italicised in the Statement; Maangamizi, Ma’at and Ubuntu are not, being established in our usage.
African principles and concepts
Kufunda: a Kimbundu term refering to the establishment or re-establishment of justice. Kufunda regers to an ethical or criminal case brought before a judge.
Maangamizi. A Kiswahili term from the verb angamiza, to cause destruction, to utterly destroy; the a prefix indicates amplified and massive destruction. It captures intentionality — deliberate, systematic action rather than accident or natural disaster, which distinguishes it from Maafa. Professor Marimba Ani popularised Maafa, which in Kiswahili means calamity and misfortune; Maangamizi carries what a claim requires and Maafa does not, since a calamity befalls a people where a genocide is decided upon. It names the intentional and
continuing systemic destruction perpetrated against African peoples through racialised chattel enslavement, wars of extermination and conquest, colonialism and neocolonisation: one ongoing crime, and not a series of disconnected and closed historical episodes. The term is used because no European word reaches it: those available in the languages of the responsible states describe a trade, an institution or an era, and none names the destruction of a people.
Ma’at. The principle of truth, justice, balance, reciprocity and right order, first set out in Kemet. A standard of conduct by which the conduct of the powerful is weighed, holding that balance is restored where the harm ceases. Its opposite is isfet, disorder.
Serudj Ta. The Ma’atian duty to repair, renew and remake the world: to raise up what is in ruins, repair what is damaged, rejoin what is severed, replenish what is depleted, strengthen what is weakened, set right what is wrong, and make flourish what is fragile.
Ubuntu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person through other persons. Personhood is constituted through relationship. Botho in Setswana and Sesotho; Hunhu or Unhu in Shona.
Ukama. Shona: relatedness. The web of relation extending beyond the human to the environment, the ancestors and the divine.
Seriti. Sotho-Tswana: the dignity and life-force of a person, built by acclaiming the dignity of others, so that persons form one field in which any change in one alters all. Isithunzi among the Nguni.
Orí. Yoruba: the inner head, which carries destiny. Realised through ìwà, character, and ẹsẹ, human striving, within community. The person comprises also ara, the body, and èmí, the life-breath.
ọmọlúàbí and Safuu. Yoruba and Oromo conceptions of the person which, with Ubuntu, hold being to be intergenerational as well as relational.
Ityala aliboli. isiXhosa: a crime does not rot. The Pan-African legal principle that time cannot alter the truth of what occurred and that a wrong remains actionable until it is set right. Mhosva haiori in chiShona, deni haliozi in Kiswahili, omusango teguvunda in Luganda, molato ga o bole in Setswana and Sesotho.
ɔman. Akan: the egalitarian polity.
Sankofa. Akan: to go back and fetch what was left behind.
Formulations advanced within our movements
Maatubuntuman. A self-repaired African world constituted as a Pan-African union of communities, holding together Ma’at, Ubuntu and ɔman, in which membership is held by communities rather than by territorial states. Advanced by PARCOE, the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament (GAPP) and the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign, and recorded in the Statement as one interpretation of the principles at Section G.
Maatubuntujamaa. The African Heritage Community for National Self-Determination: a self-repairing African heritage community exercising non-territorial autonomy. Jamaa is Kiswahili for family and community.
Ubuntudunia. The wider world in which such a polity could live without domination, in which many peoples coexist on their own terms.
Sankofahome. A space of return and intergenerational transmission on the continent.
Planet Repairs. The nexus of cognitive justice, environmental justice and reparatory justice. Each repairs a dimension of the Maangamizi: reparatory justice repairs genocide and ethnocide, cognitive justice repairs epistemicide, and environmental justice repairs ecocide.
Ubuntukgotla. The Peoples’ International Tribunal advocated for and being built by the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign: a juridical organ in which harm is weighed and balance rendered according to African jurisprudence. Kgotla is the Setswana assembly and court.
Rematriation. The return of African peoples into right relationship with land, ancestors and the knowledge carried through the mothers — distinguished from repatriation, which returns a person to a territory defined by a state.
Reparations Afriliteracy. The capacity of African peoples to read, understand and act upon the reparations demand in its full depth: its history and historiography, its jurisprudence, its terminology, its political economy, and the African traditions in which it stands.
The African Mother Principle. The ordering of society by the generative, nurturing and regenerative capacities that African cosmologies name as feminine, held in balance with those named as masculine, and expressed in the standing of women in governance, culture and ethics.
Twin-lineal paradigm. Dr Oba T’Shaka’s formulation, drawn from the Twa-based family systems of ancient Africa, holding that African societies were ordered justly where women and men were equally empowered to govern every phase of them.
Formations
APPCITARJ. The All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice: a campaign initiative of the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign, founded within PARCOE, for a community-led commission of inquiry in the United Kingdom.
ISMAR. The International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations.
PARCOE. The Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe.
PACOR. The Pan-African Community of Resistance.
ENGOCCAR. The Europe-Wide NGO Consultative Council for Afrikan Reparations.
INOSAAR. The International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations.
EPAF-PAD. The Europe Pan-African Forum for People of African Descent, convenor of this Dialogue.
EPAC-RJ. The European Pan-African Coalition for Reparatory Justice.
AUADS. The African Union African Diaspora Sixth Region High Council.
GAPP. The Global Afrikan People’s Parliament.
Re-PAIR. Reparations as Pan-Afrikan Indigenous Repairs: the INOSAAR research programme supported by the European Research Council, hosted at the University of Liverpool from September 2026, with the Maangamizi Educational Trust among its community partners.
Legal and technical terms
Nemo judex in causa sua. No one may be judge in their own cause. A principle the legal systems of the European states responsible for the Maangamizi hold to be fundamental.
Intertemporality. The doctrine that acts are to be judged only against the law of their own time. Invoked by Britain in abstaining from Resolution A/80/L.48.
Extinctive prescription. The rule in civil law systems by which a right is extinguished by the passage of time without exercise. Limitation is the common law equivalent.
Non-economic loss and damage. The category established by the Warsaw International Mechanism under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: harms
to individuals, to society and culture, and to the environment which cannot be measured by market prices or gross domestic product, and which nonetheless require redress.
Substantive representation. Representation accountable to interests the affected community has collectively defined, through mechanisms by which it can mandate, direct, redirect and recall. Descriptive representation, by contrast, rests on shared identity markers alone and asks only who is in the room.
Non-territorial autonomy. The exercise of collective self-government by a people over its own affairs — its institutions, education, culture, law and representation — without holding a territory of its own.
Epistemicide. The destruction of a people’s ways of knowing, through the deliberate dismantling of their knowledge systems; now reaching into digital epistemicide.
Ethnocide. The destruction of a people’s nationhood and culture: the erasure of languages, spiritualities, naming systems and historical narratives, and the forced adoption of the coloniser’s ways of life.
Cognitive justice. The equity of all knowledges.
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