Ghana's Historic Resolution: UN declares slave trade as gravest crime

In a historic step today, Ghana moved a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly declaring the Transatlantic Slave Trade the gravest crime against humanity. The resolution passed decisively, with 123 states voting in favour, three voting against, and 52 abstaining.

The three states that voted against were the United States, Israel, and Argentina.

The United States, under Donald Trump, voted against the resolution. It is a reflex born of the US empire: the same empire built on enslaved labour, Jim Crow, and a racial caste system that has never been dismantled. For a country whose wealth was extracted from the bones of millions of Africans, opposing a resolution that calls the slave trade what it is, the gravest crime against humanity, is not surprising.

It is a calculated act of historical denial, consistent with Washington’s broader foreign policy of shielding its own foundational sins while lecturing the Global South on human rights. Trump’s administration has always acted with perversion, from emboldening white supremacists at home to sabotaging international efforts at restorative justice.

Israel’s vote against the resolution is equally telling. As a state built on the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people, it has every institutional interest in rejecting frameworks that centre historical crimes and demand accountability. To acknowledge the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity requiring reparations would be to invite uncomfortable parallels with its own system of racial domination, settlement, and apartheid. Thus, Tel Aviv aligned itself with Washington, as it nearly always does, to stand against the moral reckoning that the Global South is demanding.

The third “no” vote came from Argentina. At first glance, this may seem puzzling, but it is rooted in a long, brutal history of anti-Black erasure. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, an estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked to Argentina, forced into labour that helped build the nation’s wealth. Yet today, Argentina presents itself as a white European outpost in South America. That transformation was no accident. It was engineered. In the 19th century, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, an avowed white supremacist, implemented a systematic campaign to erase the country’s Black population.

Through mass conscription, targeted massacres, and policies that encouraged European immigration while denying Black Argentines citizenship and documentation, the state effectively made Blackness disappear from the national narrative. Argentina has long cultivated a myth of racial homogeneity, but that myth was carved out of genocide. To vote in favour of a resolution naming the slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity would force Argentina to confront its own foundational violence, a reckoning its ruling class has spent centuries avoiding.

The fifty‑two (52) abstentions reveal a more complex picture. Many European states, former colonial powers, chose to sit on the fence rather than affirm the obvious. Others likely feared the financial implications of a reparations framework. Yet the fact that 123 nations, the overwhelming majority of the world, voted in favour signals a decisive shift in global consciousness. The legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is no longer a footnote; it is being centred as the foundational crime of the modern world order.

This resolution is not merely symbolic. It gives renewed impetus to the global reparations movement. Caribbean nations, through bodies like the Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM, have long laid out a detailed reparatory justice framework. African states, led by Ghana, are now placing the issue at the heart of the UN agenda. The vote creates a strong political anchor for nations to pursue bilateral and multilateral mechanisms for restitution, from debt cancellation to cultural repatriation to direct financial compensation.

Crucially, the demand being advanced is not only about monetary compensation; it is about the resetting of the global world order. Reparations and restitution, in this broader sense, encompass the restructuring of international financial institutions, the return of looted cultural heritage, the correction of historical injustices embedded in global trade and diplomacy, and the dismantling of the racial hierarchies that continue to shape relations between the Global South and the imperial core.

This is what internationalism looks like: not empty diplomacy, but a collective demand that the imperial core account for centuries of theft, terror, and extraction. The opposition of the United States, Israel, and Argentina is a badge of honour. It reveals exactly whose interests are threatened by the truth.

The question now is whether the Global South will translate this moral victory into material power, whether the 123 nations that voted “yes” will build alliances strong enough to force the holdouts into accountability. History is watching. And as the resolution’s supporters made clear today, the era of impunity for the gravest crime against humanity is finally being called to an end.

I stands in solidarity with Ghana, with Africa, with the Caribbean, and with all peoples of the Global South demanding justice. Reparations now! Reset the world order!!