United Nations: The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on 25 March 2026 declaring the transatlantic slave trade and racialised slavery the “gravest crime against humanity,” and it also called for reparations and other forms of restorative justice. It passed by 123 votes in favour, with 3 against (Argentina, Israel, United States) and 52 abstentions, including UK, Canada and EU members.
“Today, we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice,” said Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, speaking ahead of the vote on behalf of the 54-member African Group – the largest regional bloc at the UN.
UN News adds: For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, put in shackles and shipped to the New World to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations under scorching heat and the crack of the whip.
Denied their basic humanity and even their own names, they were forced to endure generations of exploitation with repercussions that reverberate today including persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination.
The resolution emphasised “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital.”
The text was “highly problematic in countless respects,” Ambassador Dan Negrea, US representative to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), said prior to the vote.
He regretted that Washington “must once again remind this body that the United Nations exists to maintain international peace and security” and “was not founded to advance narrow specific interests and agendas, to establish niche International Days, or to create new costly meeting and reporting mandates.”
Furthermore, the US “does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”
Main points
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The resolution was spearheaded by Ghana and backed by the African Union and CARICOM.
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It says the slave trade should be formally recognized as the gravest crime against humanity.
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It urges reparations as a “tangible” way to address historical injustices.
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It also calls for the return of cultural artifacts, archives, monuments, documents, and museum collections to their countries of origin.
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The resolution is not legally binding, but it carries political and symbolic weight.
Source – United Nations.
