Ghana has hailed a groundbreaking report by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which concludes that perpetrators of the transatlantic enslavement must provide reparatory justice.
The Committee has issued authoritative guidance that States are bound under the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to provide reparatory justice for the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel slavery.
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The long-used excuse that these crimes were lawful when they were committed no longer holds, according to the guidance, which the Committee has described as a paradigm shift.
Ghana said the report provides the legal foundation beneath the moral authority of Resolution A/RES/80/250, adding that recognition is becoming obligation.
It said apology, restitution, compensation and guarantees of non-repetition are no longer matters of goodwill, but of duty.
The report comes at a time President John Mahama has been presenting a comprehensive report at the African Union Extraordinary Meeting in Angola on the landmark Ghana-led UN Resolution declaring the transatlantic enslavement as the gravest crime against humanity.
President Mahama, after convening the Next Steps Summit in Accra, is set to host a side event on Restitution in New York during the 81st session of the UN General Assembly next month.
“A crime does not rot.” Ghana said it was in this spirit that it carried the cause of the enslaved to the United Nations and that the conviction now stands affirmed in international law.
Under the leadership of President John Dramani Mahama, African Union Champion for Reparations, and in unity with the African Union, CARICOM and the diaspora, Ghana said the cause for reparatory justice continues to advance.
“The blood that binds us is stronger than the oceans that appeared to separate us,” Ghana said.
