The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans the gravest crime against humanity and called for reparations as a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs. The vote was 123 in favour, three opposed, and 52 abstentions. The US and Israel voted against. The UK and all 27 members of the European Union abstained. To abstain, under the circumstances, is simply to vote no.
The US representative said the resolution was problematic in many regards, and that America does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.
In 1953, West Germany signed the Luxembourg Agreement, committing to pay reparations to Israel and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Nobody argued that because the Nazi extermination machinery predated certain international legal instruments, Germany owed nothing.
For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, shackled, and shipped to the New World to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations. They were denied basic humanity and forced to endure generations of exploitation whose repercussions reverberate today in persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination.
The industrial revolutions of both Britain and America were financed, in no small part, by the unpaid labour of enslaved Africans. Ghana's Foreign Minister Samuel Ablakwa put it plainly: History does not disappear when ignored, truth does not weaken when delayed, crime does not rot, and justice does not expire with time.
Moral debt does not lapse. The Netherlands is the only European country that has issued a formal apology for its role in slavery.
The West speaks endlessly about the rules-based international order, about accountability, and about confronting historical atrocities. It funds holocaust museums, erects memorials to victims of Soviet terror, and prosecutes war crimes in The Hague. All that is good. But when the crime is one from which they personally profited, the rules suddenly become inconveniently complicated. The West should pay the debt.
