By: Staff Writer
April 10, 2026
The Caribbean Reparations Commission hailed the recent United Nations Resolution on African Slavery as “historic moment,” in recognizing the chattelization of African people during the height of slavery to the Americas.
The Ghana-led resolution declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement the ‘gravest crime against humanity’ was adopted at the UN General Assembly on March 25. Most countries (122) voted in favour, while 52, including all 27 European Union (EU) states, abstained. Argentina, Israel and the United States (US) voted against.
The resolution requires member states, individually and collectively, to engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including formal apologies, financial compensation and restitution.
Sir Hilary McDonald Beckles KA, vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, said on a virtual panel on Reparations that: “CARICOM has every good reason to be to be satisfied that we have been able to bring the best of humanity along the trajectory, so that we can recognize this crime as it certainly was. We did decide in 2001 at Durban that the reparatory justice movement is going to be the greatest political movement of the 21st Century, and it is indeed on its way to be.
The Durban Declaration acknowledges that slavery and the slave trade are crimes against humanity that require remedy. In contrast, the new resolution focuses on transatlantic slavery, which is described as the gravest of crimes against humanity, and explicitly calls for reparations.
The US’ opposition to the resolution and abstentions by most European countries, the United Kingdom (UK), Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand underscore the stark divergences on historical accountability.
Beckles continued: “And this has to do with the fact that the vast majority of the world that have been colonized, that has had their people enslaved that have their resources plundered and extracted and driven into underdevelopment by this extraction of slaves by slave owning nations, that all of these nations are now looking for their development, for their place in the postmodern world. And each way they turn they are finding that this crime against humanity, is still a dominant legacy in their everyday lives and their economic planning and their political vision and their social upliftment.
“The legacy of this very immediate crime is still hampering development and all of the things that humans are expecting from their realities.
“We have had some pushback in this regard, because those slave owner nations that created this scenario, that built this global chattel slavery around the African people, and have benefited enormously from that, when we consider that Britain, for example, had 200 years of free labour, 200 years of free labour from 10 million African people, but yet these nations abstain from agreeing to this resolution, and we know why they have done so.
“The arguments they have used are really not acceptable to mean meaningful historical or political analysis, the notion that that chattel slavery and the creation of property rights and human beings, that was legal because they made it so and indeed adds to criminality of the situation and the gravity of it.”