UN Moves To Recognise Slave Trade As Major Human Rights Atrocity

The United Nations General Assembly is set to vote on Wednesday on a resolution that seeks to describe the transatlantic African slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity,” in what supporters say is an important step toward healing and justice.

Ghana’s President John Mahama, one of the African Union’s leading voices on slavery reparations, visited the UN headquarters to advocate for what he described as a “historic” resolution.

Speaking at the UN, he said the move “allows us as a global community to collectively bear witness to the plight of more than 12.5 million men, women and children, whose homes, communities, names, families, hopes, dreams, futures and lives were stolen from them over the course of 400 years.”

He also described the initiative as “a safeguard against forgetting,” while criticising recent political developments in the United States aimed at restricting books and teaching materials on slavery, segregation, and racism.

The draft resolution states that it “declares the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.”

It further draws attention to the continuing impact of slavery, including “the persistence of racial discrimination and neo-colonialism” in modern society.

Amma Adomaa Twum-Amoah, the African Union’s Commissioner for Health, Humanitarian Affairs and Development, said that “to name these atrocities clearly is to remove the last veils of ambiguity from the historical record.”

She added that “it is to say that what was done to Africans was not a tragic accident of history, but the result of deliberate policies whose legacies structure today’s inequalities,” stressing that “justice begins with calling things by their proper names.”

Beyond recognition, the resolution also calls on countries historically involved in the slave trade to engage in restorative justice processes.

Ghana’s Foreign Minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, told AFP that “the perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade are known, the Europeans, the United States of America.”

He added that “We expect all of them to formally apologize to Africa and to all people of African descent.”

He also said one avenue for restorative justice would include “all the looted artifacts are returned to the motherland.”

Ablakwa further called for continued efforts to address structural racism, noting that “compensation” could also be considered for affected communities.

Responding to criticism from some UN member states that the wording of the resolution could create a “hierarchy” of suffering, he insisted that the intention was not comparative.

“We are not ranking suffering when we say that the transatlantic slave trade represents a ‘gravest crime against humanity,’ it is not to introduce a hierarchy,” he said.

He explained that “what we are saying is that if you look at all of the atrocities that have happened in the history of humanity, none have been this systemic, this prolonged, over 300 years, and the lingering consequences of that,” adding, “We are not ranking pain. We are not saying that our pain should be valued more than your pain.”