Guiding principles

Truth-telling is political praxis. Truth is collective resistance to denial. The Forum will authorise its own hearings; it will not wait for governments to grant permission.

Reparation is transformation. It includes the redistribution of resources, recognition, and power via the return of land, the repatriation of ancestors, the revitalisation of language, and the abolition of institutions that carry colonial logic into the present. Apology and compensation are necessary but, alone, are insufficient.

Cognitive justice requires that knowledge production be plural, situated, and led by those historically silenced. The archive belongs to the people who contributed to it. Oral testimony, song, dance, and silence stand alongside written record as legitimate evidence.

Solidarity and autonomy operate together. Each participating community will act locally and autonomously, and each is connected by shared ethics and mutual accountability. No community speaks for another and every community is heard.

Care, consent, and reciprocity govern the Forum’s process. We know that process matters as much as outcome and so the Forum will model the world it seeks to build. Witnesses will control their own testimony and communities will decide how their stories are used, who can access them, and for what purpose.

Transnational imagination is essential to the work. The struggle against empire transcends borders, linking lands, waters, and peoples. A child removed from her family in Cootamundra, a young man enslaved and trafficked from West Afrika to the West Indies, a labourer brought from Bihar to Fiji under indenture, a farmer displaced in Kenya to make room for a settler, a family separated by the border drawn through Ireland - these are separate histories that tell the same story.