The Next Steps Conference on Reparatory Justice in Accra from 17 to 19 June 2026 did not happen in a vacuum. It was convened as the direct follow-up to a landmark United Nations General Assembly Resolution – A/RES/80/250 – adopted on 25 March this year, in which 123 member states voted to declare the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. That resolution, championed by Ghana and backed by African Union member states and the Caribbean community, was the first in the United Nations’ 80-year history dedicated exclusively to slavery and the slave trade. Three months later, Accra was where the world came to decide what to do next.

123  UN Members voted for the Resolution

80+  Countries Represented in Accra

18  Strategic Pillars of the Accra Commitments

3 Global Panels established

“Reparation is a legitimate demand. It is not about vengeance but justice. From Accra, we are sending a clear message that the time has come to restore, reform, and repent.”: H.E. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Reparation Is Not Only About the Past

There remains a persistent tendency to cast reparations as a debate about the past: the Accra Conference swiftly dismantled that narrative. Countries across Africa and the Caribbean carry sovereign debt burdens that economists trace directly to the economic structures imposed during slavery and colonial rule, centuries of extracted wealth, suppressed development, and deliberately undercapitalized economies. The same historical processes that enriched Western countries left our countries without the institutional foundations, the accumulated capital, and the human development that compound and grow across generations. When Ghana, Jamaica, or Senegal pays a higher risk premium on international borrowing than a European developed country, that is not a neutral market outcome. It is a legacy.

The same logic applies to climate change. Africa contributes the least to global greenhouse gas emissions and suffers the most from its consequences. The industrial wealth that produced those emissions was built, in significant part, on the labor of enslaved Africans and the resources of colonized African nations. The International Court of Justice’s recent advisory opinion on climate change has now clarified that breaches of climate obligations may themselves give rise to reparations. The circle is closing.

And then there is the less quantified but no less real dimension: the psychological and cultural wound. The systematic erasure of African history, the theft of cultural artifacts, the distortion of knowledge about who we were and what we built before colonization, these are ongoing acts of harm, not finished ones.

What Actually Happened in Those Three Days in Accra

The conference produced a 46-paragraph outcome document titled the Accra Next Steps Commitments,  structured around 18 strategic pillars. But what made this gathering different from previous declarations was that it also produced something rarer: immediate, concrete action.

• The Netherlands pledged to return approximately 2,000 cataloged artifacts to Ghana, with Dutch officials making a symbolic presentation of the full catalog to President Mahama during the conference itself.
• Germany announced its readiness to repatriate cultural artifacts from the Bono Traditional Area.
• Denmark’s foreign minister offered a formal apology for Denmark’s role in the slave trade and committed to partnering with Ghana to preserve the slave forts along our coastline, including Osu Castle, built by Danish colonizers, as permanent sites of memory and truth-telling.
• France’s President Macron, speaking virtually, committed to establishing a joint scientific commission to locate African artifacts currently held in French institutions.

These are not small gestures. The Netherlands’ commitment of 2,000 items would be among the largest single repatriations of African artifacts in history. Denmark’s apology,  formal, unambiguous, from a serving foreign minister at a multilateral conference,  is precisely the kind of acknowledgment that the Accra framework identifies as a foundational step towards reparatory justice.

Three new global institutional bodies were also established:

A High-Level Global Advisory Council on Reparatory Justice,

A Global Expert Panel on the Restitution of Cultural Heritage, and

A Global Legal Panel on Reparatory Justice.

These will build the evidentiary and institutional record that feeds directly into the UN General Assembly’s work in the coming years. The conference also agreed to convene annually, a commitment to sustaining momentum rather than allowing this to become another declaration that gathers dust.

The Architecture of a Global Framework

What strikes a careful reader of the Accra Commitments is how comprehensive and interconnected its vision is. This is not a narrow demand for a cheque. It is a reimagining of the relationship between history and the contemporary global order, structured across 18 interlocking pillars:

Truth & Apology: Full, formal, unconditional acknowledgment, with guarantees of non-repetition and the repeal of colonial-era legal codes.

Legal Justice: Strengthening international, regional and domestic pathways to accountability, redress and access to justice for generational victims.

Compensatory Reparations: Fair and adequate compensation grounded in international law – not charity, but a legal obligation that exists as a matter of international law.

Cultural Restitution: Return of looted artifacts, human remains, and archives to countries of origin. Preservation of slave forts and castles as permanent sites of memory.

Debt Relief & Financial Justice: Comprehensive reform of sovereign debt mechanisms, including cancellation where necessary, and reform of credit rating agencies that impose unjust risk premiums on the Global South.

Climate Justice: Reparatory justice that promotes climate resilience, connecting historical responsibility directly to the climate crisis and its repair.

Health Sovereignty: Addressing medical apartheid, multigenerational health trauma, and the historic exploitation of African bodies in scientific research and experimentation.

Diaspora & Right of Return: Strengthened pathways for citizenship, voluntary return and reintegration, reconnecting Africa with its global family across continents and generations.

Read together, these pillars add up to something important: a claim not just for redress, but for restructuring. The conference did not only ask for an apology. It demanded reform of the UN Security Council, of international financial institutions, of sovereign credit rating agencies, and of the global tax architecture. It called for a Global Reparations Fund. It placed reparatory justice in direct conversation with climate justice, gender justice, and the digital divide. This is a framework for a different world, not just a settlement for the old one.

The Honest Questions We Must Also Ask

The Accra conference closed with pledges, not yet with physical returns. The Dutch catalog was presented symbolically; no artifacts have yet made the journey home. Germany had a prior commitment to return items from Ghana’s Volta Region that had not yet been executed. France’s announcement of a scientific commission to locate artifacts is welcome, but it is a process,  not a result. And the UN General Assembly resolution itself is non-binding. It carries profound moral authority; it does not carry legal compulsion.

There is also the question of unity. The Accra Commitments speak movingly of ending fragmentation within the global reparations movement. But anyone who has followed this debate knows how difficult that is. Caribbean and African nations do not always agree on modalities and priorities. Diaspora communities in Europe and North America have their own perspectives that do not always align neatly with state-level advocacy. Building a genuinely common front across continents, generations, and political traditions is a generational project, not a three-day conference.

None of this diminishes what was achieved. But it is important to make this clear: Accra was a beginning, not an end. The measure of this conference will be what happens in the twelve months before the next one.

What This Means for the Next Generation

Here is what we should tell young Africans about this process, and it matters that we get this right, because they will inherit both the momentum and the responsibility.

For the first time in history, the international community has named what happened to African peoples as a legal category of harm, not just a moral stain. For the first time, the question of repair has moved from the margins of international diplomacy to its centre. For the first time, countries that enriched themselves through slavery are sitting in the same room, voluntarily, at their own initiative,  to discuss what they owe. That is new. It has never happened before at this scale.

The Accra Commitments also do something quietly radical: they insist that reparatory justice must include the meaningful participation of young people in the design, implementation, and monitoring of all processes. This is not decorative language. It is a recognition that reparatory justice is not a transaction to be settled between current generations and then filed away. It is,  as the document puts it, a multi-generational and inter-generational project. The next generation is not inheriting a solved problem. They are inheriting an ongoing negotiation with the power to shape it.

The African Union’s designation of 2026–2035 as the Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent gives the agenda a ten-year institutional home. The UN’s Second International Decade for People of African Descent (2025–2034) runs alongside it. These overlapping frameworks mean that what was decided in Accra this week does not expire when the delegates go home. It has a calendar, an architecture, and a review mechanism.

A Continent That Led, Not Followed

It is worth stepping back to appreciate the geopolitical meaning of what Ghana did this week. At a moment when African nations are often portrayed in global media as recipients of aid, subjects of debt negotiations, or bystanders to decisions made elsewhere, Ghana convened the world on a matter of global justice, and the world came. Presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, representatives of the African Union and the Caribbean, legal scholars, and civil society leaders from every region. They came to Accra. They sat in the rooms Ghana prepared. They debated on the terms that President Mahama, the African Union Champion, set. And they adopted the Accra Next Steps Commitments.

What Comes Next

The path from Accra is clearer than it has ever been, even if it remains long. The three new global panels will begin building the legal and evidentiary record. The annual conference structure will sustain political accountability. The UN pathway will carry the Accra Commitments into the General Assembly and its subsidiary bodies. The African Union’s Decade of Action will keep reparatory justice at the heart of continental policymaking.

But the most important work will happen outside conference rooms. It will happen when African governments integrate reparatory justice into their national development strategies, not as an add-on but as a framework. It will happen when African universities lead the research that fills the knowledge gaps about our own history. It will happen when African civil society holds its own governments accountable for implementing the Accra Commitments, it will happen when young Africans in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Dakar, Bridgetown, London, New York, and São Paulo, etc., understand that they are not asking for sympathy. They are asserting a right. That is the real next step.

The time has come to restore, to remember, to reform,