UN human rights chief says slavery and colonialism still fuel racism, urges reparatory justice

9 October 2026

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk told a high-level dialogue on reparatory justice in Geneva that the legacy of enslavement and colonialism continues to shape the lives of Africans and people of African descent.
Over 30 million people were violently uprooted from Africa and condemned to a life of slavery, he said, and no country involved in enslavement or colonialism has fully confronted that past.
He said the transatlantic trade was an organised system of domination that treated tens of millions of African men, women and children as commodities.
In some regions police are several times more likely to use force against people of African descent, and people of the diaspora are disproportionately represented in prisons.
Turk warned that artificial intelligence and other technologies are already reproducing human biases and could deepen systemic racism.
He said reparatory justice should not be understood as financial compensation alone, but should include truth-telling, formal apologies, memorials and restitution of cultural artefacts.
Many countries still lack anti-racism legislation and fewer than one in four have comprehensive anti-discrimination law.