What to know as Africans welcome UN vote on slavery reparations

General Assembly’s resolution on Wednesday declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparations is being welcomed across Africa and among slave descendants and advocates of restorative justice. At the same time, questions swirl over what the resolution means and what reparations could look like. About 12 million Africans were forcefully taken by European nations from the 16th to the 19th century and enslaved on plantations that built wealth at the price of misery.

Ghana pushed for the resolution for ‘moral awareness’ Ghana sought the resolution that also urged “the prompt and unhindered restitution” of cultural items — including artwork, monuments, museum pieces, documents and national archives — to their countries of origin without charge. Ghana foreign affairs minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa said the resolution “recognizes that even within (its) complexity, there are moments in history that stand apart … To acknowledge this is not to diminish any other history; it is to deepen our collective moral awareness.” Although General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, they are an important reflection of world opinion and are often referenced as the legal framework for causes. In this case, the decision “marks an important step toward truth, justice and healing,” the African Union said in a statement.

Some countries opposed or abstained from the resolutionA total of 123 member states voted in favor of the resolution, with three votes against it from Argentina, Israel and the United States. The United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union were among the 52 abstentions. Speaking before the vote, deputy U.S.

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ambassador Dan Negrea said while the U.S. opposes the past wrongdoing of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and all other forms of slavery, it “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.” France through Sylvain Fournel, legal adviser for its U.N. mission, argued that the resolution “seems to establish a hierarchy among crimes against humanity,” an outcome that gives rise to “serious legal difficulties and runs the risk of creating a competition against historic tragedies.”

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