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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Kenneth Mohammed

Don’t look at who voted to call the slave trade ‘the gravest crime’, look at who didn’t

A man sits at a podium with the UN symbol on it. A woman and two men sit higher up at a desk behind him with screens in front of them
Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, addresses the UN general assembly in New York ahead of the vote on 25 March. Photograph: Bianca Otero/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

The most revealing thing about Ghana’s UN resolution was not that it passed. It was who could not bring themselves to stand with it.

On 25 March, the UN general assembly adopted the Ghana-led resolution by 123 votes to three, with 52 abstentions. It declared that the trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans was “the gravest crime against humanity” and urged steps including formal apologies, reparatory justice and the return of looted cultural property. The three states that voted no were the US, Israel and Argentina; the UK and all EU member states abstained.

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