Countries Should Mull Slavery Reparations Despite Complex Legal Claims – UN

The United Nations said on Tuesday countries could consider financial reparations among the measures to compensate for the enslavement of people of African descent, though legal claims are complicated by the time passed and the difficulty in identifying perpetrators and victims.

A report of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said no country had comprehensively accounted for the past and addressed the contemporary legacy of the violent uprooting of an estimated 25 million to 30 million people from Africa over more than 400 years.

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The report stressed, however, that the difficulty in making a legal claim to compensation “cannot be the basis for nullifying the existence of underlying legal obligations”.

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