On Wednesday, the United Nations’ General Assembly designated the transatlantic African slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, despite opposition by the United States and abstaining from some European countries.
The resolution was spearheaded by Ghana and received 123 votes in favour. Three countries – Argentina, Israel and the United States – voted against, and 52 abstained, including Britain and EU member states.
“Today, we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice,” said Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, speaking ahead of the vote on behalf of the 54-member African Group – the largest regional bloc at the UN.
Mahama is one of the African Union’s most vocal supporters of slavery reparations.
In a post published on its website, the United Nations said: For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, put in shackles and shipped to the New World to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations under scorching heat and the crack of the whip. Denied their basic humanity and even their own names, they were forced to endure generations of exploitation with repercussions that reverberate today including persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination.
The resolution emphasised “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity” by reason of “the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences”.
“The adoption of this resolution serves as a safeguard against forgetting,” said Mahama.
The resolution is non-binding but goes beyond acknowledgement – it asks nations involved in the slave trade to engage in restorative justice. It also highlights the legacy of slavery via “the persistence of racial discrimination and neocolonialism” in today’s society.
“The transatlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity that struck at the core of personhood, broke up families and devastated communities,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said.
“To justify the unjustifiable, slavery’s proponents and beneficiaries constructed a racist ideology – turning prejudice into a pseudoscience.”
The United States called the text “highly problematic”.
“The United States also does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred,” said US ambassador Dan Negrea.
French representative Sylvain Fourne said the resolution “risks pitting historical tragedies against each other that should not be compared, except at the expense of the memory of the victims”.
Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa dismissed criticism that the text sought to rank human suffering. He also alleged that some nations had refused to acknowledge their crimes.
“The perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade are known, the Europeans, the United States of America. We expect all of them to formally apologise to Africa and to all people of African descent,” he said.
One pathway towards restorative justice, he said, is that “all the looted artefacts are returned to the motherland”. He also suggested that institutions continue to address structural racism and that “compensation” could be offered to those affected.
