UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’ – Guardian 25-03-2026

UN votes describe slave trade as gravest crime against humanity Report by Guardian on landmark resolution aiming for political recognition at highest level call of members for reparatory justice Screenshot Guardian's website

“UN votes to describe slave trade as ‘gravest crime against humanity’

Members call for reparatory justice as landmark resolution aims for ‘political recognition at the highest level’

Eromo Egbejule in Abidjan
Wed 25 Mar 2026 19.16 GMT

The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.

The landmark resolution passed on Wednesday was backed by the African Union (AU) and the Caribbean Community (Caricom). It had been proposed by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, who said: “Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of millions who suffered the indignity of slavery.”

Voting in favour were 123 states, while Argentina, Israel and the US voted against. There were 52 abstentions, including the UK and members of the EU [all 27 members including Germany; ed.].

James Kariuki, the UK chargé d’affaires to the UN, said Britain continues to disagree with fundamental propositions of the text and was “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities”.

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As the resolution went ahead in New York, the British MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy presented a petition to the House of Commons, pushing for a state apology by the UK for its key role in slavery and colonialism of Africans.

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For four centuries, seven European nations including the UK enslaved and trafficked more than 15 million Africans across the Atlantic. The scale of the chattel slavery was such that 18th and 19th-century abolitionists coined the term ‘crime against humanity’ to describe it. Historians have also linked wealth from enslavement to mass industrialisation in the west.

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Ghana, which has been at the forefront of an effort across Africa and the Caribbean for reparatory justice, pushed for the terminology to be updated to reflect the lingering impact of chattel slavery.

Experts involved in drafting the resolution say it is an attempt to get “political recognition at the highest level” for one of the darkest eras in history.

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The UN first acknowledged that slavery was a crime in a 2001 conference against racism, xenophobia and related intolerance in Durban, South Africa [see link to post in ‘Primary Sources’ section of this website below; ed.].

Panashe Chigumadzi, a historian and rapporteur for the AU’s committee of experts on reparations for slavery, colonialism and apartheid, who drafted the framework, said that conference had had many limitations, including its framing of slavery as a “retroactive moral judgment rather than a continuous legal reality”.

“The AU framework … establishes that the inception of the trafficking in enslaved Africans during the so-called ‘age of discovery’ constituted the definitive break in world history, which inaugurated the break from localised feudal regimes to the modern world racial capitalist system,” she said. “This structurally transformed the fates of all peoples across the world through racialised regimes of labour, capital, property, territory and sovereignty that continue to determine relations of life and the land on which it is lived.”

While the resolution is not legally binding, it is now expected to pave the way for more progress in a fight that scholars and some politicians say has been hampered by the rise of rightwing movements in the west.