Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly on the phone from Addis Ababa, Amr Aljowaily said the African Union (AU) Summit that concluded on 15 February adopted the transition into a 2026-2035 Decade for Justice and Reparations. The 2025 theme of the year — Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations — was not an isolated, commemorative moment, he said, but the foundation of a long-term, transformative agenda anchored in concrete mechanisms, partnerships, and programmes of action. The message highlighted the fact that the AU remains fully committed to advancing a reparatory justice agenda. “We see the coming decade as the space where recognition must translate into restitution, reform and repair across institutions, narratives, and material conditions,” Aljowaily said.
He explained that the AU summit took place at a critical moment for the reparations agenda because the AU Commission’s interim report on the 2025 theme had just offered heads of state and governments an opportunity to take note of progress and identify gaps. Last month’s AU Summit mandated the Commission — of which the Citizens and Diaspora Organisation is part — to coordinate and lead a system-wide campaign on reparatory justice for Africans and people of African descent. “In practical terms, that means serving as a substantive coordinator and secretariat: driving system-wide coordination, engaging member states and the African diaspora, building partnerships, and reporting to the AU policy organs on progress, gaps, and recommendations,” Aljowaily said.
He also noted that the single biggest institutional achievement through 2025 is establishing and making operational the Committee of Experts on Reparations (AUCER) and the Legal Reference Group (AULER). Their inception meetings, held back-to-back in Addis Ababa from 15 to 19 December 2025, drew up initial plans and timelines, clarified coordination with AU organs and laid the basis for structured reporting. But the AU Commission aimed to secure system-wide coherence by establishing the African Union Coordination Team on Reparations (AUCTR) too, Aljowaily added, which has helped to mainstream reparatory justice across the whole AU system, and will provide for collaboration with African groups in New York, Geneva, and Paris to ensure that continental priorities in the multilateral, especially UN, agenda are taken into account. In addition, member states are called upon to integrate the justice and reparations agenda into national frameworks as a central part of pan-Africanism. The agenda is now being considered as a flagship project of Agenda 2063, the continent’s overall vision for socio-economic development.
Aljowaily named the working groups that the two main AU mechanisms have established within their upcoming plan, demonstrating the AU’s comprehensive perspective. For example, the AUCER will establish working groups on Global Governance Structural Reparations, Economic/Financial and Environmental Reparations, Cultural, Scientific, Educational Reparations and the Rights Perspective, among others. As for the AULER, it will address applicable sources of international law, classification, and qualification of the historical crimes of transatlantic enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid: “This further, in-depth work bears testimony to the wide scope of the justice and reparations agenda, and the drive to further specialisation in order to address its multidimensional aspects.”
In 2025, Aljowaily added, the reparations message was taken to the broader African and global public through various tools including holding the international conference on crimes of colonialism in Algiers from 30 November to 1 December 2025. The conference explored themes ranging from the generational impact of colonialism and cultural spoliation to economic dispossession, environmental damage, and legal pathways for recognition, and reparations — culminating in the “Algiers Declaration”, endorsed by the summit, as a contribution to criminalising colonialism in international law and proposing 30 November as an African day of homage to the victims of enslavement, colonisation, and apartheid. Another headline event was the ninth Pan-African Congress in Lomé, Togo, held from 8 to 12 December 2025 on the theme of renewing Pan-Africanism and Africa’s role in multilateral institutional reform. It provided a vital political and intellectual space to connect reparations with broader questions of global governance.
The commission report also tackled “restoring Africa’s true representation” on maps and in schoolbooks, Aljowaily noted, describing this step as symbolic and deeply structural at the same time. “The AU summit adopted a decision to correct distorted cartographic representations of Africa which have long diminished the continent’s geographic scale, thus potentially impacting the perception of its socioeconomic potential and global standing,” he said. He noted that, building on a 2024 MoU on “Upscaling Engagement with People of African Descent,” the AU also moved to structured cooperation with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) through thematic working groups that will begin operational work this year. One landmark he pointed to was the second Africa-CARICOM Summit, held in Addis Ababa in September 2025, which adopted the Addis Ababa declaration on “Transcontinental Partnership in Pursuit of Reparatory Justice,” consolidating a shared AU-CARICOM vision and joint programmatic agenda.
The AU Summit adopted this declaration and endorsed the communiqué calling for a Third Africa–CARICOM Summit in a CARICOM member state in 2028, calling for enhancing institutional relations through the possible exchange of representational offices, among other means. Additionally, Aljowaily explained, the first ministerial meeting between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the African Union took place on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York last September. Colombia, the CELAC presidency, has now extended invitations to a high-level forum between the two sides to take place in Bogota later this month.
Aljowaily noted that the reparations team has significantly deepened its collaboration with UN agencies and multilateral forums. This includes work with UNESCO on new volumes of the General History of Africa focused on the diaspora and global Africa, a sideline event at UNESCO’s 2025 MONDIACULT ministerial on “Restitution and Cultural Rights in Africa,” held in Spain in October 2025. The event explored how the return and restitution of cultural property can advance cultural rights, strengthen policy and legal instruments, and foster constructive cooperation between member states and institutions. In addition, a high-level fringe event at this year’s AU Summit, “Reparations, Memory and Sovereignty”, focused on bringing the African position on the restitution of heritage resources in line with Agenda 2063, as well as the outcomes of the UNESCO African Dialogue of January 2025.
UNESCO, he elaborated, is a key partner because restitution is also a question of culture, education and international norms, all of which are long-standing UNESCO mandates: “ The personal presence of the Director-General of UNESCO Khaled El-Anany, the second African to lead the organisation, President John Dramani Mahama as AU Champion for Justice and Reparations as well as a statement by Egypt’s foreign minister signalled continental leadership, multilateral partnership, and high-level political commitment.”
The AU Summit urged member states to fully support the initiative of the AU Champion on Justice and Reparations, President John Mahama of Ghana, tabling a draft resolution at the UN General Assembly that calls for recognition of the transatlantic slave trade as one of the greatest crimes against humanity. This is meant to elevate Africa’s reparatory justice agenda to the highest multilateral level. Intensive consultations have already started in this regard. “I highlight in this regard that 25 March is the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Aljowaily said.
In 2025, the AU Commission successfully laid the foundations of a continental reparatory justice agenda, but it also identified several structural obstacles. It had to restore its own institutional capacity, while at the same time establishing new mechanisms such as the AUCER and AULER and see their operation through. Securing adequate funding was and remains another hurdle, he added. At the national level, the AU Commission is still seeking even engagement among member states’ reporting and implementation, and it still needs to expand and consolidate partnerships beyond the initial network of UN bodies, CARICOM, civil society, and professional associations. Looking ahead to the decade, these same issues become critical challenges, and it is important to sustain momentum after 2025. One other main task for the future, Aljowaily pointed out, is to place the normative framework being developed continentally under a wider multilateral umbrella, adding diplomatic weight on the one hand and achieving practical impact on the other.
For Aljowaily, the agenda is deliberately forward-facing even as it is rooted in historical truth. From the outset, the theme of the year was framed not just as a moral reckoning with transatlantic enslavement, colonialism and apartheid, but as a programme to mainstream reparatory justice with a view to transforming present structures and future opportunities. “I only need to recall here that our African Heads of States and Governments reaffirmed in 2024 that in the context of the claim for reparatory justice there is a need to address the inequities that characterise the current international economic and political systems, necessitating the reform of the global financial and trade architecture as well as the UN Security Council; and in the same context of reparatory justice, they recognised the need to address the consequences that have persisted in many forms including, among others, debt burden, illicit financial flows, and climate injustice,” he concluded.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 5 March, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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