IN SHORT: Ghana tabled a resolution at the UN today declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. It is the first such resolution in the UN’s 80-year history. All 55 African Union member states back it. Europe is resisting. The vote outcome is pending.
Ghana tabled a landmark resolution at the United Nations General Assembly today, March 25, calling for the transatlantic slave trade to be formally declared the gravest crime against humanity. President John Dramani Mahama, acting as African Union Champion on Reparations, presented the draft before delegates on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. If adopted, it would be the first comprehensive UN resolution on slavery in the organisation’s 80-year history.
The resolution, submitted on behalf of the 54-member African Group, is titled the Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity. It seeks formal UN recognition of the scale, duration, systemic brutality, and enduring global consequences of the slave trade, which removed an estimated 12.5 to 18 million Africans from the continent over four centuries. The text went through seven rounds of informal consultations before reaching the floor, a fact Ghana’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Samuel Yao Kumah, cited directly in a pre-vote briefing after one delegation signalled an intention to call for a recorded vote.
Ghana’s Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa has framed the initiative as grounded in international law rather than sentiment. The resolution invokes the legal principles of jus cogens and erga omnes, arguing that the violations committed during the slave trade generate ongoing legal responsibilities for the international community. The draft calls on member states to engage in good-faith dialogue on reparatory measures including formal apologies, financial restitution, return of cultural artefacts, rehabilitation of affected communities, and guarantees of non-repetition.
The resolution has received endorsement from all 55 African Union member states, adopted by consensus at the AU’s 39th Ordinary Session in Addis Ababa in February. The Caribbean Community, Brazil, and US civil rights activist Al Sharpton have all publicly backed the initiative. Speaking at a High-Level Special Event on Reparatory Justice at UN Headquarters on Tuesday, Mahama described how enslaved Africans were stripped of identity, chained through the Middle Passage, and auctioned as commodities upon arrival, with between 10 and 15 percent perishing before they reached land.
The resistance at the UN has come largely from Europe. Reuters reported in March that Ghana expected broad support but acknowledged pushback from European nations historically opposed to formal reparations processes. Ahead of the vote, British commentators reignited a domestic row, with some in the UK press arguing that current governments cannot be held accountable for historical actions. Ghana’s Ministry rejected the framing directly: the initiative is not confrontational, it is a demand for honest reckoning and collective redress.
Following today’s action, Ghana intends to advance reparatory justice through the African Union’s Decade of Action on Reparations and African Heritage running from 2026 to 2036, in parallel with the CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice which links reparations to debt cancellation and public health investment.
Bigger Picture: Ghana’s UN move shifts reparations from a moral argument to a legal and diplomatic process. It does not guarantee compensation or compel specific action, but it establishes a multilateral framework through which those demands can be pursued systematically. The significance for African economies is direct: the resolution explicitly links the slave trade to present-day debt asymmetries, development gaps, climate vulnerability, and global financial governance. If adopted, it creates an internationally endorsed basis for Africa to argue, within formal UN mechanisms, that structural global inequalities are not simply the product of geography or governance but of a crime whose consequences were never addressed. That is a different kind of leverage than any African nation has had before.
Sources: GBC Ghana / GBC Ghana / Reuters via US News / GBC Ghana
