WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The UN General Assembly on Wednesday adopted a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.
The resolution spearheaded by Ghana received 123 votes in favour. Three countries - Argentina, Israel and the United States - voted against and 52 abstained.
'Today, we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice,' said Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama, speaking ahead of the vote on behalf of the 54-member African Group - the largest regional bloc at the UN.
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For more than 400 years, millions of people were stolen from Africa, put in shackles and shipped to the New World to toil in cotton fields and sugar and coffee plantations under scorching heat and the crack of the whip.
Denied their basic humanity and even their own names, they were forced to endure generations of exploitation with repercussions that reverberate today including persistent anti-Black racism and discrimination.
The resolution emphasised 'the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labour, property and capital.'
Ambassador Dan Negrea, US representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, said the U.S. 'does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred.'
The horrors of slavery echoed in the General Assembly Hall as Member States commemorated the International Day to remember its victims.
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