UN committee presents legal case for broad slavery reparations

GENEVA

This file photo shows a demonstration for 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 Aug. 31.

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

“States parties must implement comprehensive reparatory measures for people of African descent, covering all aspects of remedies,” the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) said in its findings, presented in a document entitled General Recommendation-40.

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 Aug. 31, is expected to provide a powerful new tool supporting reparations claims.

This is “a watershed moment,” committee member Pela Boker-Wilson told AFP.

The convention counts 182 countries as parties, including the United States, Britain, 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.

In many of those same countries, black people continue to face discrimination and poverty today.

“Confronting historical injustice cannot be separated from the fight against present-day racial discrimination,” Boker-Wilson said.

While the CERD’s findings are not legally-binding, Boker-Wilson stressed that they carry “significant authoritative weight,” and could be used by officials to inform judicial review, by courts as an interpretative tool, as well as to support litigation.