Gorée Island: Dakar, Senegal Photo | Leamus/iStock

By Violet Ikong

On March 25, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a landmark resolution recognizing the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity.” Sponsored by Ghana, the resolution called for reparations to address historical wrongs against Africans and the diaspora. 

“This [adoption] should have happened long ago,” Adams Bodomo, a Ghanaian professor of African Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, told Amjambo Africa. 

Described as the largest forced migration in history, the transatlantic slave trade saw more than 12 million enslaved Africans trafficked between the fifteenth century and the 1860s, abducted from their communities and loaded onto ships to journey across the Atlantic.

Close to two million people—including women and children—died on the horrific voyage called the Middle Passage, while those who survived ended up working on plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean under harsh and dehumanizing conditions. 

For advocates of reparations, these figures are not just historical; they are evidence of a system whose consequences continue to shape global inequality today. “We cannot just let history pass us by, or forget about the pain and humiliation that happened to our ancestors,” Bodomo said. 

For the UNGA 80th session president, Annalena Baerbock, the slave trade represents “an affront to the very principles enshrined in the Charter of our United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, themselves born, in part, from these injustices of the past.”

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Who should pay reparations?

Resolutions adopted by the UNGA are primarily symbolic and non-binding, meaning they cannot be legally enforced on governments or member states. This gap raises the question of how the push for reparations could play out. According to Bodomo, reparations should be paid by those who instigated and benefited from what he calls an oppressive system. “I don’t like to call it the slave trade,” he said. 

The nature of the reparations, he highlighted, should be rooted in building a financial framework that allows for scholarships, foundations, and support initiatives for people who suffered the impact of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as their descendants. 

Citing the Holocaust, he explained that Germany still pays reparations to the Jews who survived the genocide that took place during World War II. 

Countries “denying some of the things they did”

Not every member state supported the resolution on the transatlantic slave trade. The motion received 123 votes in favor, while three countries—the U.S., Israel, and Argentina—voted against it. Fifty-two other countries, including the UK, Canada, and Australia, abstained from voting. 

Bodomo said the voting pattern reveals “who the true friends of Africa are,” while stating that no country can run away from the past. “It signals that some people are denying some of the things that they did. But what is surprising is these other Europeans who abstained because they think that, in the long run, they will be asked to pay the reparations, and so they want to deny history,” Bodomo said. 

Explaining why it opposed the resolution, the U.S. representative to the UN, Ambassador Dan Negrea, said in an official statement that while the country continues to condemn all forms of slavery, acknowledging them as historical wrongs, it considered the text of the resolution problematic.

The statement described the UN as existing to maintain international peace and security, and not to advance “narrow, specific interests and agenda, to establish niche international days, or to create new costly meeting and reporting mandates.”

He added that the U.S. “also does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”

While the UK abstained from voting, the leader of the country’s Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, called out the representative of the prime minister for not voting against the resolution. The Tory leader accused Russia, China, and Iran of voting with other countries to demand trillions in reparations, which, according to her, targets UK taxpayers’ money. 

“Britain led the fight to end slavery,” Badenoch said. “We shouldn’t be paying for a crime we helped eradicate and still fight today.” 

In a statement, Ambassador James Kariuki, the UK Chargé d’Affaires to the UN, said the country holds a firm view that historical atrocities should not have a hierarchy. “Doing so simplifies the complexity and vast scale of suffering endured in different contexts. It risks diminishing the experiences of communities whose trauma and suffering was felt just as strongly,” Kariuki said. 

In a press release, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, through his spokesperson, welcomed the resolution and applauded Ghana’s President, John Mahama, for his leadership, which he said reflects the continent’s prolonged call for the full recognition of the slave trade as well as its lasting consequences. 

“This historic decision marks an important step toward truth, justice, and healing, and reinforces the urgent need to address the enduring legacy of slavery,” Youssouf said.

Since the UN resolution was adopted, some critics have challenged it, claiming that Africans also took part in the transatlantic slave trade and should also be made to apologize and pay reparations.