The Director of the Centre for Reparation Research (CRR) at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Professor Verene A. Shepherd, has been re-appointed chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).
CERD is the United Nation’s oldest treaty body, and the Committee implements the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
Professor Shepherd, whose candidacy was supported by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), is the first citizen from the region as well as the first Jamaican to be a member of CERD and to serve as Chair. She will serve for the next two years.
She has been a member of the committee since 2016, receiving the highest number of votes among those who competed for a seat on the CERD twice in a row. This is the third time that the social historian and reparations advocate will serve as chair of the committee, having held four-year terms in 2015 and 2019, respectively.
UWI said she brings her expertise in administration, history, gender studies, migration studies, reparation, and human rights to the position.
She also brings to the CERD, her experience as a member of the United Nation’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD) from 2010-2015, during which time she helped to draft the Program of Activities for the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent from 2015-2024.
Professor Verene A. Shepherd is a world-renowned historian, and one of the Caribbean’s pre-eminent scholars and advocates for gender justice, racial equality and non-discrimination, and reparation for the impact of European colonization on Indigenous Peoples, Africans, and people of African and Asian Descent, and the continuing harm of colonialism on African Diaspora communities. She has built her name around years of research and writing on the Caribbean in various areas, specializing in research on migration, human rights and social justice, gender, and Jamaican economic history – guided by the lens of subaltern studies.
In the academic and international space, Professor Shepherd has achieved several firsts: the first Jamaican and CARICOM citizen to be elected to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the first female to chair the board of trustees of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust. She was also the second woman to be made a professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, 40 years apart.
Professor Verene A. Shepherd is the host of the first-ever dedicated history program on Jamaican radio, ‘Talking History’ on Nationwide 90 FM. This program attempts to bridge the gap between academia and the public, helping to keep Jamaica’s history alive and make it engaging and exciting for students as well as the everyday listener.
CMC/
