UN Racial Discrimination Committee Presents Legal Case for Broad Slavery Reparations

Countries are legally obliged to provide broad reparations for harms resulting from both direct and indirect involvement in the transatlantic African slave trade, a United Nations committee said on Monday.

Issuing a fresh interpretation of an important international rights treaty, the UN watchdog said the accord obliges countries to work to redress the harms caused by slavery and the continuing consequences.

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It stressed that reparatory justice combined “a wide range of measures conceived as monetary, non-monetary and structural.”

The document, which was approved last week but only published on Monday, is expected to provide a powerful new tool supporting reparations claims.

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The convention counts 182 countries as parties, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, Portugal and other nations that were heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, which from the 16th to 19th century saw millions of African men, women and children shipped to the Americas to work in brutal and often deadly conditions.

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The Liberian human rights lawyer maintained that the committee’s finding brought about “a paradigm shift” in the framing of reparatory justice from a simple historical responsibility to a present-day legal obligation.

It clarifies that countries are required to take “active measures that are geared towards restoring the dignity, the justice and equality that people of African descent deserve.”

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