The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 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. The long-used excuse, that these crimes were lawful when they were committed, no longer holds. The Committee itself calls this a paradigm shift.
Ghana hails the groundbreaking report of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This is the legal foundation beneath the moral authority of Resolution A/RES/80/250. Recognition is becoming obligation. Apology, restitution, compensation and guarantees of non-repetition are no longer matters of goodwill, but of duty.
It is instructive that this 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 consequential side event on Restitution in New York during the 81st session of the UNGA next month.
“A crime does not rot.” It was in this spirit that Ghana carried the cause of the enslaved to the United Nations. Today that conviction stands affirmed in international law.
Under the visionary leadership of President John Dramani Mahama, African Union Champion for Reparations, and in unity with our kith and kin across the African Union, CARICOM and the diaspora, our just cause advances. The blood that binds us is stronger than the oceans that appeared to separate us.
Justice does not expire with time.
Read the Committee’s landmark General Recommendation No. 40: https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cerd/general-recommendations
