Africa-Press – Ghana. The United Nations (UN) General Assembly has adopted to Ghana’s resolution to recognise the slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”.
The adoption of the resolution, which was tabled by Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, the African Union Champion for Reparations, would hopefully now pave the way for healing, justice, and the payment reparations.
It was adopted with 123 countries voting in favour.
While three countries – the United States, Israel and Argentina voted against it.
Whereas 52 abstained, including the European Union Member States and Britain.
President Mahama in tabling the Motion before the UN General Assembly said the draft resolution was a result of months of consultation and consensus building by continental bodies, nations, experts, scholars, and jurists, with the sole aim of achieving a united front and grounding the final outcome in truth, compassion, and moral conscience, remembrance, education, and dialogue.
“So, today we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice,” he said.
The President noted that the adoption of this resolution serves as a safeguard against forgetting and that it also challenges the enduring scars of slavery.
Quoting former President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, he said: “With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness.
For to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong”.
President Mahama also cited Civil Rights Leader Dr Martin Luther King, saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”.
President Mahama said: “We travel this long road, each step guided by a desire to be better and to do better, each step bringing us closer to the kind of world we would want to leave for our children”.
To the delegates at the UN, the President said: “on this beautiful day in March, we are called to stand on the right side of history”.
“Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right.
“For the memory of the millions who suffered the indignity of the slave trade and those who continue to suffer racial discrimination.
“Let our vote on this resolution restore their dignity and humanity,” he added.
The resolution allows the world body, as a global community, to collectively bear witness to the plight of the 18 million men, women, and children whose homes, communities, names, families, hopes, dreams, futures, and lives were stolen from them over the course of four centuries.
