Precedent And Selectivity In Reparations: Why Have Comparable Atrocities Received Redress While African Enslavement Has Not?
- IJLLR Journal
- 1 hour ago
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Ali Dawud Esq., Director of Legal Advisory Services, Permanent Mission of Ghana to the United Nations.
A Comparative Political Analysis with Reference to UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/80/250 - Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime against Humanity (25th March, 2026)
ABSTRACT
On 25th March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution A/RES/80/250, formally declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement as the gravest crime against humanity. The Resolution arrives at a moment when the international legal architecture has long acknowledged reparatory obligations for grave historical wrongs, yet has produced frameworks of redress for the Holocaust, Japanese American internment, and apartheid while leaving the transatlantic slave trade without comprehensive remedy. This essay examines the political, structural, and jurisprudential conditions that enabled reparations in these three cases, and interrogates the specific barriers that have obstructed analogous justice for African enslavement. Drawing on international law, comparative politics, and historical analysis, it argues that the current international legal framework is structurally inadequate to meet the aspirations of peoples of African descent because it was itself constituted by the very states that perpetrated and benefited from these crimes. The essay concludes that meaningful reparatory justice requires not merely the application of existing law but its fundamental re-imagination.
