African and Caribbean countries have called for a formal apology and reparations from countries that benefited from the transatlantic slave trade. <\/p>\n
The demands come at the end of a three day conference in Ghana which looked to advance the push for reparatory justice. <\/p>\n
It follows a landmark UN resolution earlier in March which recognised transatlantic slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity”, urging UN member states to contribute to a reparations fund. <\/p>\n
Around 12-15 million African men, women and children were captured and trafficked to the Americas to work as slaves from the 15-19th century. <\/p>\n
A 19-point reparations plan has been endorsed as part of the “Next Steps” conference in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. <\/p>\n
It calls for comprehensive debt relief, the restitution of looted cultural property, and the establishment of a global reparations fund, though no specific amount was stated. It also addresses the disproportionate impact of slavery on African women and girls. <\/p>\n
The conference leaders also called on countries formerly involved in the slave trade to offer their “full, formal and unconditional apologies”. <\/p>\n
Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama told delegates: “History does not ask us to inherit guilt, but it asks us to inherit responsibility”. <\/p>\n
French President Emmanuel Macron also gave a virtual note at the conference, where he recognised that enslaved people were “dehumanised and treated as goods”. <\/p>\n
However, he cautioned against reducing reparations for slavery to financial compensation alone, saying they should not be seen as a “cheque written to bring the story to a close”. <\/p>\n
The UN General Assembly vote took place in March, with 123 votes in favour, and three votes – the United States, Israel and Argentina – against declaring the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity. <\/p>\n
52 countries, including the United Kingdom and European Union member states abstained.<\/p>\n
Unlike UN Security Council resolutions, those from the General Assembly are not legally binding.<\/p>\n
The UK has long rejected calls to pay reparations, saying today’s institutions cannot be held responsible for past wrongs.<\/p>\n
“No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another,” UK ambassador to the UN James Kariuki had then said.<\/p>\n
The US ambassador to the UN echoed this, saying his country did not “recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred”. <\/p>\n
He added that the UN resolution was unclear as to “whom the recipients of ‘reparatory justice’ would be”. <\/p>\n
No country has ever paid reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans or affected African, Caribbean and Latin American nations.<\/p>\n
Most of the reparations paid by governments came in the form of compensation to slave owners in the 19th Century, rather than to those who had been enslaved.<\/p>\n
That includes the UK – in the 1830s, following the abolition of slavery, the country paid owners the equivalent of more than $21bn (\u00a316bn) in today’s money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"African and Caribbean countries have called for a formal apology and reparations from countries that benefited from the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":649008,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-649007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}