UN: slavery was “gravest crime against humanity” (but US opposed & UK abstained)
JVL Introduction
It has taken far too long but on 25th March 2026, the UN voted overwhelmingly to recognise slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and called for reparations. 123 states voted in favour, the USA, Israel and Argentina opposed the motion and the UK, along with members of the EU abstained.
We must remember that in the UK when slavery was finally abolished, compensation was paid. It was paid to the owners who had to give up their property (sic). The amount paid out after the Act of Abolition passed in 1837 constituted 40% of the UK’s tax receipts. Not one penny (let alone the promised 40 acres and a cow) went to those who had been enslaved. See, eg Tax Justice Network.
This was as big as, if not bigger than, the bankers bail out to “save the economy” and it was only finally paid off nearly 200 years later in 2015, so most of you reading from the UK will have unknowingly contributed to this injustice through your own taxes. The UK representative at the meeting did not want to create a hieraerchy of historical atrocities. Perhaps this is a recognition that colonialism was also a “historical atrocity”. If he was thinking of the Nazi atrocities, compensation was paid by Germany to (Jewish) Holocaust survivors. (There are issues with that scheme but that would be for another article)
Financial reparations are, in any event, only part of what Europe owes Africa and the people descended from those who were enslaved. Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP spoke in Parliament at the same time as the debate in New York and we agree with what she said.
“So many of the intersecting global challenges we now face are rooted in the legacies of enslavement and empire: from geopolitical instability to racism, inequality, underdevelopment and climate breakdown,” the petition read. “To truly confront these issues, we must acknowledge where they come from.”
Whether this vote will make a real difference remains to be seen but, it certainly seems that those European nations who would have the most to “lose” in terms of paying reparations obviously understood that slavery was a terrible thing that has had long lasting consequences for Africans, their countries and their descendants but were not prepared to consider planning, even over time, for compensation.
LL
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Wed 25 Mar 2026. Read the original here.
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’
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My income is less than $15K annually and I would gladly share a chunk of it with descendants of enslaved people. There is not a single white person who has not benefitted from slavery.
The slaves were BOUGHT from other Africans – especially Ghana, whose economies collapsed when the British enforced abolition. What, do they want paying TWICE ? Probably not so keen for reparations if they had to pay up.
The subject is rife with BS and hypocrisy. The Guardian is a fine place for it.
As in the JVL header piece here, our own country led a hypocritical way by abolishing slavery within our empire and paying out huge compensation – to the slave owners. That money further enriched many rich families, who ought to be considering helping descendants of slaves in the West Indies for example. Hypocrisy was within the attitude of the time and indeed now. By the 19th century, we had discovered that the Indian Empire was far better than slavery by being full of people who worked for minimal pay.
I was disappointed by our government’s apparently minimal effort toward restoring the recently hurricane-destroyed homes of poor inhabitants, descendants of our former slaves, of our former BWI Jamaica.
Slavery was rife within Ancient Greece. Ought impoverished modern Greece be obliged to pay compensation to the descendants of slaves of thousands of years ago. Of course not. Many of the slaves in Ancient Greece were their own illegitimate children recycled through slave markets. Democracy as a word comes from Ancient Greece, where only a few rich men had a vote.
I think that a top atrocity to be focussing our minds on now, as led by JVL, is the blatant genocide of the indigenous people of what was Palestine for most of the time since Jesus and which is openly accompanied by forced displacement in a one-sided colonialist war to make way for newcomers from outside of the region whose overriding qualification is their religion.
Kemi Badenoch thinks Britain should have voted against!