The United Nations has launched a second International Decade for People of African Descent. This new decade — which officially began January 1, 2025, and will continue until December 31, 2034 — will again employ a Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to document and highlight quality-of-life issues for Black people worldwide.
The first Decade, which ran from 2015 to 2024, saw the Permanent Forum meet three times. The Permanent Forum will hold its fourth session at the United Nations’ New York City headquarters April 14-17, 2025.
The theme of the second Decade mirrors that of the initial decade: “recognition, justice, and development.”
Activists expressed excitement, gratitude, and a good deal of apprehension about the naming of a second Decade. “There were some positives in the First Decade,” said Conrad Bryan of the Association of Mixed Race Irish, “but unfortunately so many States started taking action near the very end,” making it seem as if not much was accomplished.
A long-term Black activist demand
The first Decade was important because it placed the global concerns of African descendants in the international arena. This had been a long-term Black activist demand –– a request that started back when the United Nations system was created.
Activists have wanted the United Nations to pay attention to the issues faced by Afrodescendant communities since its establishment.
In 1947, W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sent the United Nations a 94-page document entitled “An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities.” “[T]oday,” DuBois wrote in the introduction, “the paradox again looms after the Second World War. We have [a] recrudescence of race hate and caste restrictions in the United States and of these dangerous tendencies not simply for the United States itself but for all nations. When will nations learn that their enemies are quite as often within their own country as without? It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi; not Stalin and Molotov but Bilbo and Rankin; internal injustice done to one’s brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad.”
Harlem’s own Malcolm X planned to turn to the U.N. to aid Black Americans. In a 1964 article, the Amsterdam News quoted the Black-nationalist leader as saying that he had “received pledges from African nations to support a stand against the United States before the United Nations. The United States would be compelled to face the same charges as South Africa, Portugal, and Rhodesia. The United States…has colonized the Negro people just like the people of Africa and Asia were colonized by Europeans.”
More recent calls for the U.N. to acknowledge how racism curtails the lives of Black people were made at the Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in 2001 and again at the IV Meeting of Afro-descendant Social Movements in Caracas in 2011.
Prioritizing Black communities
Following the first Decade declaration, the U.N. created a Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to advise its Human Rights Council. But Venezuelan anthropologist Diógenes Díaz Campos asserts that neither this initiative nor the first Decade has led to the kind of new policies that change the realities of Black communities.
Díaz Campos is an executive committee member of ARAAC (Articulacion Regional Afrodescendientes de America Latina y el Caribe/Regional Afrodescendant Coordination for Latin America and the Caribbean) and served as the delegate to U.N. events from the Red de Organizaciones Afrovenezola (Network of Afro-Venezuelan organizations). “The second International Decade for People of African Descent is being met with skepticism in light of the failure of the first one,” he claimed. “While millions of people of African descent remain in critical poverty, initiatives such as the U.N. Permanent Forum are criticized as elitist and manipulated spaces. There is an urgent need to build an autonomous and radical movement that prioritizes historical reparations and restorative justice and exposes opportunistic leadership and the complicity of power centers.
“There is an urgent need to evaluate the first decade, [look at] the compliance by States with the general guidelines of ‘recognition, justice, and development,’ diagnose the few public policies developed and their achievements, and look at the execution of the budget and the balance on the part of Afrodescendant communities and peoples. In general, there has been no progress in public policies in favor of the more than 200 million people of African descent in [this] region. We are still in a situation of critical poverty and the faces of our women, children, and youth are images of misery.”
While many activists acknowledged that the U.N. should enhance its mechanisms, most believed that the organization’s initiatives have positively impacted the advancement of their political rights at home.
Jacqui Goegebeur, a spokesperson for the Association of Belgian Metissen (Association Métis de Belgique/Metis van België), told the Amsterdam News, that the Permanent Forums were a helpful opportunity to meet with other Afrodescendant groups and form alliances. “It was, as far as it concerns our case, it was good,” Goegebeur said. “We organized our own event and it was very positive with people thinking of working together to create a working group on justice so as to create knowledge and be professional. I hope that those kinds of visions will be realized.”
In 2019, Belgium’s prime minister publicly apologized for the discriminatory policies his nation imposed on “métis,” or mixed-race children. These children, the offspring of European fathers and women from Belgian colonies like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda, were forcibly placed in orphanages in the 1940s and 1950s. Goegebeur says that the 2019 public apology was shaped by the first Decade’s focus on recognizing Afrodescendant people. “In the case of mixed-race métis children in Belgium, the court decided that it was indeed a crime against humanity and that the Belgian state was responsible,” she noted. “We hope that in the following discussions and meetings with the government, we will be able to find agreements on what Belgium will do and should do to facilitate us to get our rights and demands in line.”
Bryan of The Association of Mixed Race Irish reports that Ireland’s people of mixed African-Irish heritage successfully utilized U.N. mechanisms to highlight their concerns. “On a positive note, the Irish State introduced a fund to support people of African descent in the country who wish to run projects around the themes of recognition and celebration of people of African descent,” he said. “More generally, I am hoping that the second Decade will bring more progress in terms of justice and development. Importantly, we need a lot more political support and funding from States to make the mechanisms more effective and to ensure that a new declaration on human rights becomes a reality.”
Meanwhile in Canada, Hodan Ahmed, the founder of Arawelo Institute for Leadership & Public Policy, says Black Canadian activists in Halifax, Ontario, and to a certain extent Quebec, pushed their government to respond to the declaration of the first Decade. “Prime Minister [Justin] Trudeau and his government recognized the decade in 2018: three, almost four years after the decade was recognized at the U.N. level, they acknowledged the decade. Canada has put a lot of money behind the decade, more on funneling funds into Black entrepreneurship, like [CA$] 800 million so far has been invested in Black communities. One of our major concerns was that you have all of this money going around into different Black communities in a way that hasn’t been going around for decades, but now that Trudeau resigned, when the conservative government comes to power, a lot of that will disappear because there is not a substantive policy in place or legislation to keep it.”
Ahmed, who is also a senior U.N. Human Rights Fellow for People of African Descent, noted that the Permanent Forum’s members are well-established activists and scholars who are appointed by the OHCHR to be on the panel –– they’re not paid for their work and only receive travel and hotel fare reimbursements to attend forums from their governments. “People forget that the Permanent Forum for People of African Descent is a policy forum –– it doesn’t have a particular mechanism to create funds, but it is a forum that allows Black people to have a direct conversation with state actors and to work with the Permanent Forum members. … The forum comes under the OHCHR – UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, and the OHCHR is the least funded by the UN, but they do the most work.
“I would say it’s up to us to push our respective countries to contribute to this Forum because the expectations of the U.N. Permanent Forum and the lack of funding that they face, it doesn’t match. They can’t do adequate work; they can’t create access to civil society with the funds that they actually get.”