For decades, the demand for colonial reparations in Africa existed in a carefully managed space of Western comfort. It was acknowledged just enough to appear morally sensitive, yet dismissed as impractical, anachronistic, or legally impossible. European capitals perfected a language of regret without responsibility-issuing symbolic apologies, commissioning museum exhibits, or funding limited development programs that carefully avoided the word “reparations.” By the end of 2025, that era effectively ended in Algiers.

With the adoption of the Algiers Declaration, the African Union (AU) has shifted the reparations debate from moral protest to structured legal confrontation. Emerging from the International Conference on the Crimes of Colonialism held in Algiers from November 30 to December 1, the declaration provides the first concrete institutional roadmap for the AU’s 2025 theme: Justice through Reparations. It does not ask Europe to feel guilty; it demands that international law recognize colonialism as a crime against humanity, enforce restitution of plundered wealth, and calculate the ecological and economic damage inflicted over centuries.

The declaration’s significance lies not in its rhetoric, but in its intent to weaponize law, history, and diplomacy against a system that has long insulated colonial powers from accountability. For Africa, this marks a decisive transition-from petitioners at the gates of Western institutions to architects of an alternative legal and moral order.

The ink on the Algiers Declaration had barely dried when Algeria took the first sovereign step to translate its principles into enforceable law. On December 24, the Algerian National Assembly voted overwhelmingly to criminalize French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962. Parliamentary Speaker Brahim Boughali described the moment as “a day written in letters of gold,” underscoring its historical weight.

The law is neither symbolic nor ambiguous. It formally categorizes 27 specific crimes committed during French occupation, including mass summary executions, forced displacement, cultural erasure, land expropriation, and what Algerian lawmakers explicitly term “ecological genocide”-a reference to the long-term environmental devastation caused by French nuclear testing in the Saharan desert. By embedding these crimes within a rigid legal statute, Algeria has sent an unmistakable signal to Paris and Brussels: the so-called........

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