THE HILL - The U.S., Israel and Argentina on Wednesday voted against a United Nations resolution led by Ghana to label the international slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and call for reparations.
The resolution received 123 votes from the U.N. General Assembly in favor and 52 countries abstained, including all 27 European Union members, the United Kingdom, Australia, Oman and Japan.
It states that the “trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized 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 that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labor, property and capital.”
The resolution also focused on the need to address historic wrongs toward Africans and people of the diaspora, and it placed emphasis on claims for reparations.
Diplomats cheered and some danced over the resolution’s adoption
Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Dan Negrea called the resolution’s text “highly problematic in countless respects.” Negrea said in a statement that the U.S. “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”
“The United States also strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy,” he said. “The assertion that some crimes against humanity are less severe than others objectively diminishes the suffering of countless victims and survivors of other atrocities through history.”
Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, who led the resolution effort, said he was “overjoyed” by the resolution’s passage. Ahead of the vote, he noted that it was being held on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
“I cannot think of a better way to honor our forebears on the day of remembrance than to have the majority of the world’s countries affirm that the trafficking and enslavement of nearly 13 million human beings is, indeed, the gravest crime against humanity,” Mahama wrote on the social platform X.
“One of those forebears, François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, who was born into slavery but became one of the architects of Haiti’s liberation, the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean, said: ‘The greatest weapon against oppression is unity,'” he added.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also praised the resolution’s passage and called for the removal of “persistent barriers that prevent so many people of African descent from exercising their rights and realizing their potential.”
The resolution’s adoption is not legally binding, as U.N. Security Council resolutions are.
