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 UN Committee has issued authoritative guidance stating 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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According to the report, the long-used argument that these crimes were lawful when they were committed can no longer hold. The Committee has described the development as a paradigm shift.
Ghana said the report provides the legal foundation beneath the moral authority of Resolution A/RES/80/250, stressing that recognition is becoming obligation.
Apology, restitution, compensation and guarantees of non-repetition, Ghana said, are no longer matters of goodwill but of duty.
The report comes as President John Dramani Mahama presents a comprehensive report at the African Union Extraordinary Meeting in Angola on the landmark Ghana-led UN Resolution declaring the transatlantic enslavement the gravest crime against humanity.
President Mahama, after convening the Next Steps Summit in Accra, is also set to host a side event on restitution in New York during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly next month.
“A crime does not rot.” Ghana said it was in this spirit that the country carried the cause of the enslaved to the United Nations, adding that the conviction now stands affirmed in international law.
Under the leadership of President John Dramani Mahama, African Union Champion for Reparations, Ghana said it would continue advancing the cause alongside the African Union, CARICOM and the African diaspora.
“The blood that binds us is stronger than the oceans that appeared to separate us.”
