The UN Resolution on Slavery

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

March twenty fifth, twenty twenty six. We are in New York at the United Nations General Assembly Hall. Representatives of member states take their seats. A resolution is called and members vote. One hundred and twenty three countries vote yes, fifty two countries abstain, three countries vote no. The resolution before them declared that the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and the racialized slavery that followed it constituted, and I am quoting directly, the gravest crime against humanity. Not a tragedy, not a historical wrong, not an unfortunate chapter, but the gravest crime against humanity. The three countries that voted no were the United States, Israel and Argentina. The entire Union abstained. The global South, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and much of Asia voted yes. My name is Amadou. This is Learning Africa. And this episode is about the vote that took place on March 25th, 2026. What it took to get there, what the map of those votes and responses tells us about how power actually works, and what a resolution that is not legally binding can mean. Let me put you inside the room. It holds hundreds of delegates, simultaneous interpreters in six languages, who have spent entire careers learning to say nothing precisely. So the applause in the hall that followed the announcement of the result is not nothing. The simple fact that it happened tells you something about what the people in that room understood had just occurred. Ghana's President John Mahama, who spoke on behalf of the 54 member African group, said, 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. Advocates who have been working on this for decades said it was the most significant multilateral declaration on the parations since Durban in 2001. The language of the resolution was precise and deliberate. It did not say the slave trade or slavery. No, it said enslaved Africans, the people and their descendants alive today, not historical. It named the scale, nearly thirteen million people taken over four centuries. It named the architecture, a global system of racial hierarchy that did not end with emancipation, but was restructured into Jim Crow, into the wealth gaps and incarceration rates that still define the lives of black people in the Americas and across the African diaspora today. And then it said this was not a tragedy, because a tragedy implies accident, something beyond human choice. It said this was a crime done deliberately, sustained deliberately, and its consequences are present measurable and ongoing. That shift from tragedy to crime is a legal and moral architecture. A tragedy does not create obligation. A crime does. If slavery is a tragedy, the appropriate response is remembrance and sympathy. And if it was a crime, which this declaration says it is, the gravest crime against humanity, then the appropriate response includes remedies, acknowledgement, accountability and repair. This did not happen by accident, and it did not happen quickly. The reparations movement is older than the United Nations. Its roots run through the demands of formerly enslaved people after emancipation, through the Pan-African Congresses of the early 20th century, through liberation movements that demanded not just political independence, but economic redress for what colonialism had taken. But the modern multilateral architecture begins in 1993, the Abuja Proclamation. In April of that year, the Organization of African Unity convened a group of eminent persons in Abuja, Nigeria. They produced a document that made a claim the international community had never formally entertained. The document stated that Europe and the Americas owed Africa and the diaspora reparations for the slave trade and for colonialism, and that the OAU should pursue that claim through international institutions. It was the first formal multilateral African declaration on reparations. Most of the world ignored it. Then came 2001, the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa produced a declaration acknowledging the slave trade as a crime against humanity, but in hedged language weaker than what the African and Caribbean delegations had wanted. Before the final document was agreed, the United States and Israel watched out, siding among other objections, the risk that the conference would use language amplifying reparations obligations. Twenty-five years later, in 2026, neither the United States or Israel did walk out. They stayed, voted no, and watched 123 countries ignore their objection. This is not the same thing as walking out. It is a smaller shift, but it is also a real shift. Between Durban and March 2026, the architecture kept being built. The Accra Proclamation in 2023 named the AU's intention to table a UN resolution. In 2025, the AU declared the year of justice for Africans through reparations and extended it to a full decade of reparations, 2026 to 2036, with Ghana designated as champion. And at the EU summit in Addis Ababa in February 2026, Ghana announced it would table the resolution at the UN on March 2025. Ghana delivered. Ghana's President Mahama used Ghana's decades of diplomatic architecture to build a coalition. And it was a majority. And majorities at the UN, even non-binding ones, matter. They establish what the world considers legitimate. They create the ground on which future arguments are made. Now I want to go back to the votary. Three no votes the United States, Israel, Argentina. Fifty-two abstentions, the entire European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The global north almost without exception either voted no or declined to vote yes. Every country that was built on or directly benefited from the wealth generated by enslaved African labor either opposed the resolution or could not bring itself to support it. The deputy US Ambassador to the UN said the United Nations does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred. And he said the resolution made cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage to reallocate modern resources to people in nations who are distinctly related to the historical victims. The word distinctly is doing enormous work here. It is trying to establish that enough time has passed, that the connection has attenuated enough, that the crime happened so long ago that the people living with the consequences today cannot be considered close enough to the crime to have a claim. It's simple. The people who live with the consequences are called distantly related. The people who live with the benefits, they are called innocent. The EU and UK took a different but equally revealing line. Their abstentions were accompanied by statements acknowledging the slave trade as a tragedy, not crime, and questioning the legal basis for operations on the grounds that these acts predated modern international law. Now look at the other side. 123 countries, every African Union member state, the entire Caribbean community, much of Latin America and Asia. Countries that do not themselves have a direct claim in this resolution, but recognized the principle that the world's institutional structures reflect who held power when they were built, and that the exercise of that power included acts that have never been formally reckoned with. That map, the 123 Yeses against the abstaining and dissenting global north, that is the map of a world where the majority of humanity is saying with increasing clarity, the rules that were built without us do not bind us. And we are going to build different ones. Now, what does it actually mean? The resolution is not legally binding. The General Assembly cannot compel states to act. No country is required to contribute to the Global Reparations Fund. The US, the EU, the UK can continue to oppose or abstain indefinitely. The resolution has no enforcement mechanism and settles nothing about what reparations would look like in practice. But here is what it does: it places language in the record, unequivocal language adopted by 123 nations in the world's most formal multilateral setting. That language will be cited and it will accumulate. The news that arrived late in Galveston in 1865 was that freedom had already been declared. The people it was meant for had been living in bondage for two and a half years that didn't have to happen. The news arrived, it did not undo those years, but it changed what came after. March twenty fifth, twenty twenty six is also news arriving late. The gravest crime against humanity. One hundred and twenty three countries said so. The record now says so. The resolution changes nothing on its own. The people who owe the debt are not going to pay it because of a non-binding vote. The wealth gaps that are the direct inheritance of enslaved labor will persist. The argument is far from over. But the argument has a new location. It has been made formally in the most authoritative multilateral forum in the world. The opposition has had to say its position out loud, and the majority of the world's nations said we disagree. What comes after is still being decided by governments, by courts, by communities, by the people who are still living with what was built on that crime and still working to build something different. I am Amadu. This is Learning Africa.