Adalbert John Volck, Writing the Emancipation Proclamation (from Confederate War Etchings), 1861–63. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.
On March 25, 2026, the International Day of Remembrance of Victims of Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the UN General Assembly adopted the "Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity". Ghana led the resolution, and every CARICOM member state supported it.
The same day, the CARICOM Reparations Commission welcomed the African Union's declaration of 2026–2035 as the Decade for Reparations. I am an AI scientist, not a historian or a lawyer. My interest is practical: the reparations case depends on evidence scattered across archives on three continents, and AI tools can speed up finding and organising it.
What the resolution does and does not do
A General Assembly resolution is not law. It does not compel any government to act or pay. It sets out the collective position of UN member states, and that position will be cited in negotiations and legal arguments for years.
- The wording is the strongest the UN has used. "The gravest crime against humanity" leaves no room for reading slavery as a regrettable feature of its era.
- It was adopted in the full Assembly. It carries the weight of a plenary vote, not a committee report.
- Africa led it. Ghana's sponsorship makes reparations a joint African and Caribbean cause, which strengthens the coalition in future votes.
- The Caribbean voted as one. No CARICOM state broke ranks.
The AU decade and CARICOM's Ten Point Plan
Reparations advocacy has risen and fallen with political attention. A ten-year AU commitment gives it a fixed timetable and a way to measure progress. It also matches work the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC), chaired by Sir Hilary Beckles, has done for more than a decade. The CRC's Ten Point Action Plan asks for:
- A full formal apology from European governments
- Repatriation support for people of African descent who wish to return
- An Indigenous peoples' development programme
- Cultural institutions and museums
- Action on the public health crisis, including chronic diseases linked to slavery-era conditions
- Eradicating illiteracy
- An African knowledge programme
- Psychological rehabilitation
- Technology transfer
- Debt cancellation
Each point needs research, costing and a delivery plan. That is where AI tools help.
Reading colonial archives at scale
Slave ship logs, plantation ledgers, insurance policies, colonial dispatches and parish registers sit in archives in Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark and across the Caribbean. Lloyd's of London, for example, insured enslaved people as cargo. Much of this material is handwritten and has never been transcribed.
- Handwritten text recognition can transcribe colonial-era script once trained on a few dozen pages of a given hand. Tools such as Transkribus are already used by archives for this.
- Information extraction turns transcripts into tables: names, ages, prices, dates, estates, ships.
- Record linkage connects the same person, ship or estate across archives, tracing the chain from capture in Africa to sale in the Caribbean to profit returned to Europe.
Existing projects give a head start. The SlaveVoyages database documents more than 36,000 transatlantic voyages, and University College London's Legacies of British Slavery database records who received the £20 million the British government paid to slave owners after abolition in 1833. Caribbean archives, such as Jamaica Archives and Records in Spanish Town, hold the local side of the same story, and much of it is not yet digitised.
Measuring the economic and health legacies
The harder claims are about effects that persist today. AI and statistical models can help with three:
- Tracing wealth. Which banks, insurers and firms were built on slavery profits, using linked records of owners, compensation payments and company histories.
- Modelling counterfactuals. How Caribbean economies might look if the wealth produced by enslaved labour had stayed in the region. These models rest on assumptions that opponents will attack, so every assumption should be published.
- Health patterns. The Caribbean has high rates of diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Researchers link these partly to slavery and post-emancipation diets and living conditions. Epidemiological analysis across Caribbean populations can test that link, which bears directly on Point 5.
This is where the evidence is weakest. Causal claims running across two centuries are hard to prove to a sceptical court or parliament, and AI does not remove that difficulty. It makes more data usable.
Legal research and comparisons
AI research tools can search case law and treaties quickly for relevant precedent: reparations to Japanese Americans interned in the Second World War, German payments to Holocaust survivors, and Indigenous land settlements. Lawyers still have to judge which precedents apply. The tools shorten the search.
Technology transfer and AI
Point 9 calls for technology transfer. The institutions leading AI today, from British universities to American companies, grew in economies that profited from slavery. Eric Williams, later Trinidad and Tobago's first prime minister, argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that Caribbean slavery helped finance British industrialisation; historians still debate how much.
I am not making a legal claim. My practical point is that if technology transfer belongs in a reparations settlement, then compute, AI training and research capacity for Caribbean universities should be on the list of what is negotiated.
What Caribbean institutions should do next
- CARICOM Reparations Commission: commission a shared research platform. Partner with Caribbean universities to hold transcribed archives, datasets and legal research in one place, with open access for member-state researchers.
- UWI: start a digital archives programme this academic year. Train history and computing students together on handwritten text recognition, beginning with one collection, such as estate inventories from one parish.
- National archives: publish a digitisation priority list. Identify the ten colonial-era collections most relevant to the Ten Point Plan and seek funding to scan them first.
- National reparations committees: set evidence standards. Agree how transcriptions and models are checked before they are cited, so AI-assisted findings survive hostile review.
- AU and CARICOM secretariats: divide the research. Agree who covers which archives and questions, so the decade's research money is not spent twice.
The Caribbean and Brazil received the large majority of enslaved Africans taken to the Americas. The descendants of those people now govern nations whose economies still show the marks of the plantation system. The resolution named the crime. Assembling the proof is slower work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the UN resolution legally binding?
No. General Assembly resolutions are recommendations and do not create legal obligations. Their weight is political and moral, and they can shape future negotiations. A binding outcome would need a treaty, a bilateral agreement or a court ruling; the General Assembly could also ask the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion, which is authoritative but not binding.
Has any European government apologised for slavery?
Yes. In December 2022 Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologised on behalf of the Netherlands, and King Willem-Alexander apologised in July 2023. The United Kingdom has expressed regret but has not issued a formal apology. A full formal apology is Point 1 of the CRC's plan.
How accurate is AI at reading old handwritten records?
It depends on the handwriting and the condition of the page. Handwritten text recognition works best once trained on transcribed samples of the same hand or archive, and even then names, numbers and faded passages need human checking. For evidence that may be cited in negotiations, record which pages were checked by a person and keep the original images linked to every transcription.
Where can I look up records myself?
SlaveVoyages.org is free and covers transatlantic voyages and many individual enslaved people. UCL's Legacies of British Slavery database lets you search compensation claims by colony and owner. For Jamaican records, the Jamaica Archives and Records Department and the Registrar General's Department hold parish registers and other documents.
How can Caribbean citizens support the evidence work?
Most CARICOM states have a national reparations committee or council, such as Jamaica's National Council on Reparations, which run public consultations and research. Family papers, photographs and oral histories can be offered to national archives or universities for digitising. Volunteers who can read old handwriting can also help check machine transcriptions when projects call for them.
"The UN named chattel slavery the gravest crime against humanity. The African Union declared a Decade for Reparations. CARICOM has the plan. AI tools can build the evidence base from millions of historical documents." - Adrian Dunkley, AI Boss