The United States was one of three member states that voted against a United Nations resolution, proposed by Ghana, to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity.”
Despite opposition from the U.S., Argentina and Israel, the resolution was adopted on Wednesday after receiving 123 votes in support of taking accountability for the slave trade, which saw, at least, 12.5 million Africans shipped between 1525 and 1866, according to PBS.
“There is a peculiar comfort in describing atrocities in the past tense. It implies, without quite stating, that because something has ended, it has also been resolved,” Ghana foreign minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa wrote before the vote took place. “The trafficking of enslaved Africans and the centuries of racialised chattel enslavement that followed have not been resolved.”
Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom are among the notable abstentions.
The resolution also seeks to start conversations towards reparations.
Prior to the vote, deputy U.S. ambassador Dan Negrea voiced his objection, calling the resolution “highly problematic” and saying the United States “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.”
While this resolution is not legally binding, it could cast a country in a bad light.
