UNGA adopts resolution declaring trafficking,enslavement of Africans as “gravest crime against humanity”

The draft resolution was adopted by a vote of 123 in favor, 52 abstaining and three against. Argentina, Israel and the United States voted against it.

Presented by Ghana on behalf of the African Group, the resolution declares “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity,” and affirms “the importance of addressing historical wrongs affecting Africans and people of African descent in a manner that promotes justice, human rights, dignity and healing, and emphasizes that claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs against Africans and people of African descent.”

“Today the international community has taken a significant, considerate and historic step forward by adopting this landmark resolution,” Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s foreign minister, told reporters after the vote.

With the adoption of the resolution, he said: “We have not simply passed a text, we have affirmed a truth. We have chosen remembrance over silence, dignity over erasure and shared humanity over division. We have advanced the course of justice and we have done that so emphatically.”

In his remarks at the UNGA commemorative meeting to commemorate the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “We will never forget the victims of slavery. And we must never forget the malevolent system that sustained it for so long.”

He welcomed steps taken by some countries to apologize for their role in slavery and to engage in honest dialogue about its lasting consequences, and called for “far bolder action by many more countries,” including respecting African countries’ ownership of their natural resources and ensuring their equal participation and influence in the global financial architecture and the Security Council.

Annalena Baerbock, the UNGA president, said that “the slave trade and slavery stand among the gravest violations of human rights in human history — an affront to the very principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

While slavery has been abolished, its consequences endure and continue to shape lives today, she said, stressing that addressing these injustices is a moral imperative, rooted in a collective responsibility to confront past wrongs and to shape a more just future.