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.
That voting pattern tells us everything we need to know about the world today. Much of Africa, the Caribbean and the global south treated the resolution as a simple moral proposition: the truth about one of history’s greatest engines of human theft, racial capitalism and underdevelopment. Much of the west reacted as if acknowledgment itself were a threat. Not to truth. A threat to their comfort.
The Ghanian president, John Dramani Mahama, understood what was at stake. He called the resolution “a pathway to healing and reparative justice” and “a safeguard against forgetting”. The point was not theatrical outrage but to establish, at the highest level, a crime whose scale, brutality and enduring consequences structure the present.
That is why the backlash has been so revealing. Objections from Britain and the EU poured out in the language of legal caution. Britain said it could not support the resolution because it created a “hierarchy of historical atrocities” and argued that the slave trade was not prohibited by international law at the time. Ireland, explaining its abstention, also said the wording implied a hierarchy among atrocities.
No one needs a lecture from former slave-trading powers on moral nuance. The insistence that calling slavery “the gravest” crime somehow dishonours other human suffering is a convenient way of never having to confront the world-making role of transatlantic slavery itself: the depopulation of Africa, the racial ordering of humanity, the conversion of black people into property, and the accumulation of wealth that helped build European and North American modernity. That is not a competition of suffering. It is historical specificity.
The ugliest reactions have come from the modern right. Zia Yusuf of the racially divisive Reform UK is proposing to block visas from countries that demand reparations – an escalation that reveals a punitive, exclusionary instinct, recasting claims for historical justice as opportunistic threats rather than moral demands.
The UK opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch, said Britain should have voted against the resolution, framing it as a demand for “trillions” from taxpayers, while Britain’s official position and wider commentary leaned heavily on the old fallback that the UK later helped to abolish the slave trade.
This is the familiar alchemy of imperial innocence: commit the crime, profit from the crime, ensure the compensation of slave owners when the crime ends, then seek moral credit for moderating the system you helped to create. It is a politics of historical laundering.
Reparations are caricatured as a raid on the innocent rather than an attempt to address enduring structures of deprivation created by centuries of extraction. Black claims to justice are treated as greedy or destabilising, while the wealth transferred through enslavement is settled and beyond question.
That is why this resolution matters. Its opponents want the debate trapped at the level of sentiment: yes, slavery was awful; yes, we all regret it; now let’s move on. The resolution refuses that comfort. It affirms that reparations claims are “a concrete step towards remedy”, not an emotional indulgence. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, used the moment to call for action against slavery’s legacies of racism and inequality, including fairer participation for African countries in the global financial architecture.
This is exactly where the Caribbean Community (Caricom) 10-point plan becomes so important. For more than a decade, Caricom has insisted that reparatory justice is not writing cheques. Its programme links formal apologies to Indigenous peoples’ development, public health crises, illiteracy eradication, African knowledge programmes, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer and debt cancellation. It treats slavery not as a closed moral episode but as a generator of ongoing developmental harm.
In that light, the UN resolution is brilliant because it is a first step. Not the last word, not an enforceable reparations tribunal tomorrow. It creates political and moral architecture. It moves the argument from the margins to the centre. It gives African and Caribbean states a platform from which to build the “reparative framework”. Caricom’s reparations commission has called the vote a “gamechanger”.
And let’s be honest: if the resolution were merely symbolic, the west would not be so nervous. The fear is not of rhetoric but of precedent. Once it officially recognises that this atrocity was foundational and still alive in its consequences, the old script becomes harder to sustain. Then questions follow. About debt. About underdevelopment. About museum collections. About trade structures. About who was compensated and who never was.
There is something especially dispiriting about abstentions from countries that know something about empire. Ireland’s memory ought to make solidarity easier, not harder. That is the tragedy of Europe’s response in miniature: a continent willing to remember atrocity, but deeply resistant to itself as perpetrator.
Mahama was right to admonish Ghanaians, at home and in the diaspora, who failed to see the significance of this moment. The politics of derision around reparations depends on a colonised imagination: belief that demanding justice is embarrassing, or unrealistic. But silence is not mature sophistication. It is submission. And when descendants of the dispossessed are told that naming the crime is impolite, what is being defended is hierarchy.
This UN resolution did not settle the reparations debate. It exposed who wants the wealth from slavery to remain history’s most profitable amnesia. And it reminded the world that justice delayed is not justice denied.
Africa and the Caribbean did not ask the UN for charity. They asked for truth. On 25 March, truth won the vote. Now comes the harder part: making former colonisers live with it.
