September 17-19, 2026 will feature another historic event in the evolution of the global Reparations movement sparked by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in 2013.
That’s when approximately 200 Reparations advocates from the Caribbean and The Americas, Africa and the African Diaspora, Europe and elsewhere, will gather in Barbados for the Third Caribbean Reparations Conference.
Hosted by the Government of Barbados and Chair of the CARICOM Prime Ministerial Committee (PMSC) on Reparations, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the Conference comes exactly 13 years after the movement was launched in St. Vincent & The Grenadines.
Hosted by the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and then Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves in September 2013, the First Conference featured formation of the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) and drafting of its Terms of Reference.
It also featured a major opening event headlined by the late Jamaican and Caribbean Reggae Music icon, Bunny Wailer, who was received as Patron of the Regional Reparations Movement.
That inaugural conference also heard an opening address by Jamaican and Caribbean historian, author and lecturer, Professor Verene Shepherd and another delivered by Dr. Julius Garvey, son of the legendary Marcus Garvey.
The keynote address was delivered by former Jamaica Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, with later addresses by other regional and international experts.
The Second Regional Conference was held in Antigua and Barbuda in September 2014, which presented a series of expert panels on a wide range of issues in the reparations discourse, aligned with the CARICOM Ten Point Plan (TPP) for Reparatory Justice.
The Third Conference – to be hosted at the historic Sam Lord’s Castle in St. Philip — will, among other things, examine the recently-revised ‘CARICOM Ten-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice: A Manifesto for the Coming Enlightenment’.
It will give practical direction to the implementation of the recent thrusts in reparatory justice thinking and political discourse emanating from African and Caribbean agreement at the ‘Next Steps’ conference hosted in Ghana on June 17, 2026.
The Third Conference has the support of CARICOM and the African Union (AU), CRC, University of the West Indies (UWI), Centre for Reparations Research (CRR) and The Repair Campaign (TRC) and will be attended by Chairs of National Reparations Committees (NRCs) in CARICOM member-states, as well as Associate (CRC) Members and other special invitees.
The Barbados conference follows the adoption on 25 March 2026 by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly of the landmark Resolution (A/RES/80/250) titled ‘Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity.’
The parley will also come one day after the inaugural meeting of the High-Level Global Advisory Council on Reparatory Justice, chaired by Ghana’s President John Mahama and including AU, Latin American and CARICOM Heads of Government.
The Global Advisory Council will have examined issues like its strategic direction and governance, reviewed related developments and emerging issues and evaluation of its purpose and related possibilities.
The past 13 years have seen CARICOM’s Reparations initiative expand beyond the region’s borders, with the TPP acknowledged and its principles adopted and adapted by entities in the USA and Europe, Africa and India, now a globalized movement that requires much focus on its next steps.
The March 25th adoption of the UN Resolution declaring Racialized Chattel Slavery as the ‘Gravest’ Crime Against Humanity, the June ‘Next Steps’ Conference in Ghana and the September 4, 2026 adoption by the UN General Assembly of a new world map — the Equal Earth Projection – are among major developments this year sure to be addressed in Barbados.
The UN’s March Resolution opens the way for international legal action against the nations that built empires off enslavement of kidnapped Africans, the June Conference sealed the bond between Africa and the Caribbean in a joint approach to global reparatory justice and the September resolution corrected a 450-year-old anomaly that portrayed Africa as smaller than it really is, instead of as the world’s largest continent – by far.
The Barbados conference will therefore provide a forum for exploration of all the resulting possibilities for related actions – from pursuing joint legal action for reparatory justice at the world’s highest courts, to united approaches between Africa and the Caribbean/Latin American region towards creation of related mechanisms for continuing progress, to ensuring the world better understands not only Africa’s real size, but its true role as the cradle of human civilization.
The meeting will also provide opportunities to streamlining plans for creation of new mechanisms for better communication of the Reparations message to the rest of the world using modern communications methods, including partnerships for digital libraries and archives.
It will, as well, provide a forum for tabling of proposals for new approaches to outstanding issues like developing strategic frameworks for reparations payments and engagement with global partners and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) also involved in global, regional and national thrusts in the common quest for reparatory justice for the heirs and successors of enslaved Africans worldwide.
Delegates will also be able to plan ahead for reparatory justice approaches over the next five years (2027-2031), deeper and wider community engagement and awareness programs, roles of youth and culture and relations between Civil Society and Governments.
Indeed, the Third Caribbean Reparations Conference – following the two UN resolutions and the Ghana conference — will outline the next steps for the global movement, at a time when the concept and principles of the cause have also been taken-up by nations and people as victims of wars and other forms of colonial and imperial aggression, over time.
And all the above will underline the importance of the 2013 initiative by CARICOM governments to launch a movement that started like ripples from a stone dropped in a bucket of water, to a global tsunami today, washing tidal waves on continental shores, in ways unseen, unheard, or imagined, before the TPP was carved and adopted in St. Vincent & The Grenadines.