At the most recent African Union summit held in Addis Ababa, Ghana secured the inclusion on the agenda of an initiative calling on the United Nations General Assembly to formally recognize the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the racialized enslavement of Africans as a crime against humanity. President John Dramani Mahama announced that the resolution will be presented on March 25, coinciding with the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This is not a procedural gesture nor another symbolic commemoration. It is a political intervention at the core of the international normative language. And when language shifts at the United Nations, the terrain on which legitimacy, responsibility, and eventually economic architecture are negotiated also shifts.
The transatlantic slave trade was not a historical accident. It was a system organized by states, sustained by the legal frameworks of its time, and functional to the original accumulation that enabled the consolidation of imperial economies and early industrial capitalism. Millions of people were transformed into living capital, commodities, and forced labor. Networks of trade, credit, maritime insurance, and modern banking expanded in connection with this circuit. The wealth accumulated did not vanish with abolition; it was converted into infrastructure, institutions, financial capital, and structural advantage.
The initiative promoted by Ghana introduces an uncomfortable question into the contemporary international system: if the global economic order was partially built upon a crime of such magnitude, can that order continue to present itself as historically neutral?
Normative memory
Slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were characterized as crimes against humanity in the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action in 2001. Yet that recognition was embedded in a political programmatic instrument, not in a standalone and specific General Assembly resolution that fixes the language in an unequivocal and direct manner.
The distinction matters. In international law, language defines hierarchies. Genocide was legally defined after history had produced it. The category of crime against humanity emerged after the Second World War. The transatlantic slave trade occurred before the contemporary penal framework capable of describing it with juridical precision existed.
The resolution Ghana proposes does not seek to retroactively prosecute past acts, which would be legally impossible under the principle of non-retroactivity in criminal law. It seeks to formally integrate that past into present normative language. It is not a sentence; it is a historical requalification in the broadest multilateral forum in the world.
From historical accumulation to structural debt
The accumulation generated by the slave trade and enslavement was not episodic. It was structural. It financed industrial expansion, consolidated infrastructure, strengthened financial systems, and created advantages that projected into subsequent centuries. In parallel, the African continent experienced forced depopulation, social fragmentation, and later formal colonization.
Today, many African countries allocate significant portions of their budgets to servicing external debt. That debt is almost exclusively analyzed under macroeconomic parameters: fiscal sustainability, monetary stability, sovereign risk. Rarely is the historical genealogy of structural inequality that conditioned their insertion into the international financial system incorporated into the discussion.
To speak of structural debt is not moral rhetoric. It is to recognize that contemporary asymmetries did not arise in a historical vacuum. The global economic architecture was not constructed on equal footing.
What a resolution could alter
A General Assembly resolution does not automatically generate obligations of indemnification nor does it open retroactive criminal proceedings. It does not create tribunals nor impose compensation. Yet the Assembly’s power lies not in direct coercion but in the fixation of normative frameworks.
A formal and unequivocal recognition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a crime against humanity could strengthen the legitimacy of reparative justice agendas promoted by the African Union and Caribbean states. It could influence national litigation where historical responsibility is debated. It could support the creation of multilateral funds aimed at structural development under the language of historical repair. It could even reshape the debate on debt relief by introducing an ethical dimension into a discussion that has so far been presented as exclusively technical.
The impact would not be immediate nor automatic. It would be cumulative. In the international system, language precedes norm, and norm precedes practice.
Financial architecture and legitimacy
International financial institutions operate under governance structures that reflect power correlations inherited from the twentieth century. Voting rules, access to credit, and conditionalities are not detached from that history. The African initiative introduces a different variable into that landscape: the historical legitimacy of the economic order.
If the General Assembly fixes formal recognition of the crime, the discussion on representation, voting quotas, and financial conditions may begin to shift from a purely technical terrain toward one of historical justice. It does not imply automatic debt cancellations nor immediate redistribution. It implies a transformation of the moral framework from which asymmetries are justified.
Beyond compensation
Reducing the debate to a question of monetary indemnification impoverishes it. Contemporary reparative justice can also be expressed through structural investment, technology transfer, curricular reforms, preferential financial cooperation, and multilateral development mechanisms.
The initiative promoted by Ghana does not rewrite the past, but it confronts the present. If the crime is formally recognized, the international economic order will be confronted with its own genealogy. And within that confrontation lies space to rethink how development, debt, and global legitimacy are conceived.
Normative memory is not nostalgia. It is architecture. And when architecture shifts, so too do the possibilities of the future.
