Panel Participation | High-Level Regional Convening on Reparatory Justice

Oliver Barker-Vormawor recently participated as a panellist at the Next Steps Conference on Reparatory Justice, hosted in Accra, Ghana under the leadership of President John Mahama and the Government of Ghana. The conference marked a defining moment in the global reparations movement, convening world leaders, civil society organisations, legal practitioners, and diaspora representatives in the immediate aftermath of the historic adoption of the Ghana-led United Nations Resolution declaring the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. The conference concluded with the adoption of the Accra Next Steps Commitments — a landmark blueprint for coordinated global implementation of reparatory justice — and represented, for the first time, a unified convergence of the reparatory justice movement and world leaders around a common framework, a common purpose, and a common resolve.

Oliver joined a distinguished panel to discuss the theme ‘One Hand Cannot Tie a Bundle’: Why Reparatory Justice Demands Civil Society-Government Partnership. His remarks drew on extensive engagement with the African Union, South American nations, Caribbean countries, and civil society formations across the global African diaspora, and ranged across the legal, historical, moral, and institutional dimensions of the reparations question.

On the legal foundation, Oliver addressed the argument that international law does not rank crimes in a hierarchy — an argument frequently deployed to resist the characterisation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade as the gravest crime against humanity. He dismantled this position by pointing to the doctrine of jus cogens — peremptory norms of international law from which no derogation is permitted — which already recognises a category of the gravest crimes, encompassing genocide, crimes against humanity, and related offences. Within the established sub-category of crimes against humanity, which includes murder, rape, and systematic persecution, he argued that any refusal to place the Transatlantic Slave Trade at the apex of gravity was legally incoherent and morally indefensible. The historical evidence was equally unambiguous: the Transatlantic Slave Trade so fundamentally and irreversibly altered the trajectory of the world — its economies, its populations, its political structures, and its cultural formations — that to treat it as a historical episode to be acknowledged and moved past, rather than repaired, was to misread history itself.

Oliver also spoke to the moral and communal dimensions of the reparations demand. He argued that within the African communal understanding of identity, memory, and obligation, the recognition of the humanity of ancestors who were enslaved is not a political concession to be negotiated — it is a debt owed. He noted, pointedly, that no white people were sold into the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a fact that speaks directly to how those who designed and profited from the system regarded it: as something manifestly unjust for themselves, even as they imposed it on others.

On the lacunae in public understanding, Oliver was direct. He identified the failure of educational systems as a structural obstacle to the reparations movement, noting that some people’s belief that African involvement in the slave trade weakens the moral or legal case for reparations reflects a profound gap in historical understanding. The parallel, he argued, is precise: Jewish people were involved in administering aspects of the Nazi machinery; Black people were involved in implementing Jim Crow laws. Neither fact invalidates the claim of those communities to recognition and repair — and the same logic applies without qualification to the reparations claim. He also challenged the assumption that the responsibility for repair falls exclusively on European states, arguing instead that all states must examine their own histories, systems, and relationships to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and determine what reparations looks like within their own contexts.

Oliver further emphasised that reparations must not be reduced to financial compensation alone. He highlighted Ghana’s deliberate emphasis at the United Nations on the knowledge-building dimension of reparatory justice — the requirement that Latin American states develop frameworks addressing the cultural elements of reparations, that Caribbean and African-American communities lead the development of frameworks reflecting their own specific experiences and demands, and that the global reparations agenda actively resist the whitewashing of this history. The return of cultural artefacts, he noted, is a vital dimension of the reparations project: the repatriation of objects carrying ancestral, religious, and symbolic meaning is not a peripheral issue but a central one.

Finally, Oliver addressed the abstention of European countries from the UN vote directly. He was unequivocal: the abstention is an indictment of those states, not a limit on the movement’s moral authority or momentum. Africa, he said, will not centre the European response to the reparations demand. Collectively, peoples of African descent and their allies across the world will not release the moral accelerator — and the Accra Next Steps Commitments stand as evidence that the movement is now more unified, more purposeful, and more determined than at any point in its history.