A RESOLUTION LIKE NO OTHER: Ghana’s Draft Resolution Before the United Nations and the Case for Reparatory Justice

There is a reason Ghana’s iconic Coat of Arms has always carried a profound creed: Freedom and Justice. It was not a fanciful choice. It is a reflection of the atrocities and struggles we have been through. It is an enduring reminder that the country with the world’s highest number of slave forts and castles knows what it means to secure freedom and has the indomitable spirit to fight for justice.

There is a peculiar comfort in describing atrocities in the past tense. It implies, without quite stating, that because something has ended, it has also been resolved. The trafficking of enslaved Africans and the centuries of racialised chattel enslavement that followed have not been resolved. Their consequences persist with a relentlessness that no passage of time has diminished, and it is Ghana, a nation whose coastline is quite literally built from the architecture of that crime, that has brought this reckoning before the United Nations General Assembly.

In September 2025, His Excellency President John Dramani Mahama, serving in his capacity as the African Champion for Advancing the Cause of Justice and Payment of Reparations, formally notified the United Nations General Assembly of Ghana’s intention to table a landmark Draft Resolution: the Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialised Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity. That title is not rhetorical flourish. It is a considered legal and moral designation, and its significance lies precisely in what it demands of the international community: not sympathy, not ceremony, but accountability. The Resolution is scheduled for debate on 25th March, 2026, the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Transatlantic Trafficking of Africans, a date that is itself an act of testimony.

A Country That Speaks From Its Ground

Ghana is not a distant observer of this history. It is, in the most literal sense, the place where that history carved its deepest wounds. Along a stretch of coastline less than five hundred kilometres long, colonial powers erected approximately forty forts and castles, a chain of stone and mortar that functioned not as monuments to civilisation, but as its most cynical negation. Elmina Castle, raised in 1482 and the oldest surviving colonial structure in sub-Saharan Africa, served as something far darker: a holding pen for human beings, condemned to the ocean and to oblivion. Cape Coast Castle, its twin in infamy, constructed underground chambers, airless and lightless, where thousands waited in extremis, shackled together beneath the very floors upon which colonial governors held banquets and conducted the business of State. Fort Christiansborg in Accra completed this grim network, each fortress a node in a continent-wide system of extraction that treated human life as a commodity to be catalogued, branded and shipped.

What passed through those dungeons defies the capacity of statistics to contain it. Men separated from their families and their names. Women subjected to violation as a routine instrument of control. Children stripped of every inheritance save the condition of their bondage. The Door of No Return was not a metaphor, it was a threshold crossed by more than twelve and a half million souls, each one a world extinguished. Millions more never reached the ships, perishing in raids, in coffles, or in the fetid darkness of the dungeons themselves. These are not ruins. They are witnesses, and it is from the ground they consecrate that Ghana speaks.

What the Draft Resolution makes plain and what is too often elided in polite diplomatic discourse, is that this was not the crude work of individual cruelty. It was architecture. Codified in law. Institutionalised by States. Sanctified, in certain quarters, by religious authorities who lent theological cover to the reduction of Africans to perpetual servitude. Made profitable across continents and across generations. Each atrocity was, somewhere, legal, and that is precisely what makes the demand for legal reckoning so unanswerable.

“Reparatory justice will not be handed to us. Like political independence, it must be asserted, pursued and secured through determination and unity.”
H.E. John Dramani Mahama, President of Ghana and African Champion for Advancing the Cause of Justice and Payment of Reparations

The Legal Foundation: Rights, Not Charity

Ghana has been precise on one point that admits no misreading: this campaign is not a humanitarian appeal. It is a legal claim, and the law, examined without the selective amnesia that has long served the interests of former colonial powers, is unambiguous. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits slavery in all its forms. The International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights reaffirm that prohibition and anchor it in the inherent dignity of every member of the human family. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court classifies enslavement as a crime against humanity.

The Draft Resolution invokes what is perhaps the most consequential principle of all: that the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement violated peremptory norms of international law, jus cogens, from which no derogation is ever permitted, and which generate obligations erga omnes, owed to the international community as a whole. Under the Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, those obligations carry a concrete legal consequence: full reparation, encompassing restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition. The Draft Resolution affirms what international law already requires. It is not writing new law; it is demanding that existing law be respected.

For those who instinctively reach for the statute of limitations, the Resolution offers a direct answer drawn from African jurisprudence: a crime does not rot. The Kouroukan Fouga of 1235, pre-dating European contact with the African continent by two and a half centuries, established that the right to life and physical integrity are inviolable. From this tradition, affirmed across eight centuries of African legal and moral thought, flows the principle that grave crimes generate continuing obligations until they are addressed through truth, justice and reparation.

Continental Consensus, Global Coalition

Ghana does not carry this case alone, and it never has. The 1993 Abuja Proclamation of the Organisation of African Unity formally declared slavery and the slave trade unprecedented crimes against humanity. Three decades later, that demand has acquired renewed institutional force of an extraordinary kind. At its Thirty-Eighth Ordinary Session in February 2025, the Assembly of the African Union adopted a landmark decision qualifying slavery, deportation and colonisation as crimes against humanity and genocide against the peoples of Africa, fifty-five (55) Member States giving legal and moral weight to the very claim now before the United Nations.

The African Union designated 2025 as the Year of Reparations and African Heritage, with 2026 to 2035 declared the Decade of Action on Reparations. The Accra Declaration, forged through deepening AU-CARICOM collaboration, signals a coalition that is broadening, diversifying and gaining in resolve with each passing year. September 2026 carries particular and poignant weight: it marks the centenary of the League of Nations Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery, one hundred years since the international community first bound itself, in treaty form, to ending the slave trade. That century has produced abolition, decolonisation and the codification of human rights. It has not yet produced justice. Ghana has resolved that this centenary shall not pass as yet another occasion for ceremony without consequence.

What the Draft Resolution Asks and Why the Moment Is Now

The Draft Resolution is simultaneously principled and practical, visionary and precise. It does not demand the impossible. It demands the long-overdue. Member States are called upon to enter inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparative justice encompassing formal apology, restitution, compensation, rehabilitation and guarantees of non-repetition. It presses for the prompt return of cultural properties, artefacts, manuscripts and objects of spiritual significance taken from their communities of origin. It invites the AU, CARICOM and United Nations entities to collaborate in designing frameworks fit for the scale of the task, and insists upon comprehensive education, memorialisation and research on slavery and its enduring consequences.

What the Draft Resolution does not do is equally instructive: it does not ask the international community to venture into unmapped territory. Reparative frameworks have been constructed before, for other grave crimes, by the same institutions now being asked to act. The absence of any comparable framework for the transatlantic slave trade, history’s largest and longest system of organised human exploitation, is not a matter of legal impossibility. It is a matter of political will. Ghana invites the world to summon it.

There are those who counsel patience, who suggest that consensus must be further cultivated, that dialogue must be extended, that the world is not yet ready. But readiness has never been the condition upon which justice was conferred. It has always been the product of those who refused to wait. The conversation about reparations for the trafficking and enslavement of Africans is not new: it has persisted, with unmistakable moral clarity, for more than four centuries. Four hundred years of dispossession. Four hundred years of advocacy. Four hundred years of deferred accountability. If that duration does not constitute sufficient time to build a consensus, then the question must be asked plainly: what would? The argument for delay is not an argument for prudence, it is an argument for perpetuity. Ghana rejects it and invites the world to do the same. The gravest crime in human history warrants, at the very least, the urgency of a response in our lifetime.

A Call to Every Nation

This Draft Resolution does not belong to Africa alone. It belongs to the conscience of the international order. Legal institutions, Civil Society Organisations and scholars across the continent and beyond have lent their weight to this cause, affirming that the adoption of the Draft Resolution is both a moral imperative and a historic opportunity to lay the foundation for generational healing, genuine reconciliation, and a global solidarity rooted in dignity and shared humanity.

Every Member State of the United Nations is invited to see in this Draft Resolution not a burden, but an opportunity to demonstrate that the international community is equal to its own highest ideals. A vote in favour is an affirmation that the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter; the equal dignity of all peoples; the universality of human rights and the peaceful resolution of the gravest injustices, apply in call without exceptions. It is an investment in the kind of international order that is stable, credible and worthy of the trust placed in it by peoples across the world. Nations that have championed human rights, transitional justice and the rule of law in other contexts are uniquely well placed to lead by example here, and in doing so, to deepen the legitimacy and moral authority of those very commitments.

It must be stated with equal clarity that this cause is not, at its core, about race. It is about the conscience of humankind. The trafficking and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans stands in modern times, by any honest measure, as the gravest crime ever perpetrated against a people, unmatched in its scale, its duration, its systemic design, and the intergenerational devastation it continues to produce. When more than twelve million human beings are torn from their homelands, stripped of every legal protection, subjected to systematic degradation and worked to death across generations, the wound inflicted is not only upon those who suffered it, it is upon the moral fabric of civilisation itself.

A world that does not formally reckon with a crime of that magnitude does not merely fail Africans and people of African descent. It fails humanity. The conscience at stake here is not Black or African, it is human. And it is that shared conscience, that universal inheritance of dignity and accountability, to which this Draft Resolution makes its most fundamental appeal.

The pursuit of reparatory justice is not a political contest; it is the work of building the historical understanding upon which lasting peace and genuine reconciliation depend. Support for this agenda is, at its most fundamental, a commitment to the proposition that truth matters, that dignity is indivisible, and that no people’s suffering is too distant or too old to deserve the world’s honest reckoning.

Acknowledgements

An undertaking of this magnitude is never the work of one hand, and I would be remiss to let this moment pass without acknowledging, with profound gratitude, those whose dedication has carried this initiative from principled aspiration to concrete diplomatic action. I wish to acknowledge, with genuine warmth and collegiality, my fellow Foreign Ministers who championed this agenda with conviction and courage, within their own capitals, in bilateral engagements, and in the multilateral forums where the weight of a Minister’s voice can quietly shift the course of history. Your solidarity has been both a source of strength and a reminder that the pursuit of justice, when it is true, finds allies in the most consequential places. This cause has been immeasurably strengthened by your willingness to stand with it.

To the Technical Committee established to draft the Draft Resolution: your rigour, your command of international law, and your unwavering fidelity to the integrity of this cause have shaped a document worthy of the history it addresses. To the African Union Commission, whose institutional leadership has been indispensable in giving this agenda its continental force, and to CARICOM, whose partnership has transformed a continental demand into a transcontinental coalition of conscience, I express sincere and deep appreciation.

I extend equally warm recognition to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), whose solidarity has broadened the horizons of this movement, and to Ghana’s Diplomatic Missions in Addis Ababa and New York, whose tireless engagement in the corridors and committee rooms where international consensus is quietly built, has been essential to the diplomatic groundwork that makes this vote possible.To the African Union Committee of Experts on Reparations (AUCER) and the African Union Legal Experts on Reparations (AULER), whose intellectual contributions have fortified the legal and moral architecture of this cause: your scholarship is the foundation upon which this Draft Resolution stands. To the Experts from AU ECOSOCC, whose perspectives have ensured that the voice of African civil society is woven into the fabric of this initiative, I am equally grateful.

And finally, to the global community of scholars, researchers, legal unions, academia and reparations activists who have carried this torch across decades, often without institutional support and always against the weight of inertia: history will record your perseverance as the indispensable precondition for everything that follows. This moment belongs, in no small measure, to you.

A Generation’s Test

There is a strand of thinking, comfortable in the corridors of diplomatic power, that views the reparations question as inherently destabilising, too large, too contested, too laden with the residue of history to be usefully engaged. Ghana’s answer to that thinking is not conciliation. It is a challenge. The world has shown, in other contexts, that it possesses the moral and institutional capacity to reckon with historical crimes when it summons the will. The question before the international community on 25th March, 2026, is whether it will extend that same capacity to what the Draft Resolution rightly designates as the gravest crime in the annals of human history.

Generations are not judged by the causes they found convenient. They are judged by the causes they were equal to. Ghana, through the leadership of President Mahama and the moral authority of a nation that has stood at history’s most consequential crossroads, has made its determination plain. The slave castles along its coast are not relics. They are witnesses. And before witnesses of that gravity, the defining charge of this era is not merely to remember, it is, at last, to act.