Why US, Israel and Argentina opposed UN Resolution on the transatlantic slave trade

Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama made news calling for the United Nations General Assembly to recognize slave trade as a gross crime against humanity.

The eventual vote was 123 to adopt, 52 to abstain, and 3 to oppose. The three were the United States, Israel, and Argentina that are currently led by such New Right champions as Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Javier Milei.

The idea of terming slave trade as an international issue had repeatedly featured in prominent conferences. In the conference at Algiers in November 2025 on the Crime of Slavery and Colonialism, for instance, participants petitioned AU authorities to pursue ‘reparations’ for the crimes of slave trade and colonialism. Mahama became the face of the reparation campaign.      

In the late 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s, several young African men moved to North America and Europe in search of ‘education’. Some of them sired children who became influential as politicians or diplomats. There was James Kariuki, currently Britain’s deputy ambassador at the United Nations who responded to the Mahama resolution.

Britain led the other Europeans in abstaining from the vote with Kariuki warning about creating “a hierarchy of historical atrocities …. No single set of atrocities should be regarded as more or less significant than another.” In his official statement introducing “the law of relevant time” concept, Kariuki asserted that “there is equally no duty to provide reparation for historical acts that were not, at the time that those acts were committed, violations of international law.” EU representative Gabriella Michaeldou, like Kariuki, worried about retroactive application of international law.

Kariuki’s law of relevant time doctrine was not shared by another African Briton in high office. This was Labour MP and Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan Reparations, Bell Ribeiro-Addy of Ghanaian parentage.

Britain should support the UN resolution because, she stated, “its adoption will lay foundation for justice, reconciliation and meaningful engagement on reparatory justice, accountability and healing.” She also countered the argument about slave trade not being in breach of international law at the time it took place. She wrote that “the chattel enslavement of African peoples was not a tragedy confined to its time.

It was a structural event that reconfigured the world economically, ecologically, legally, politically and racially.” Its legacy still shapes global inequalities. The UN vote had the endorsement of UN Secretary General Anthonio Guterres who called for confronting inequalities and racism as lasting legacies of slavery. In that reconciliation, the past victims of slave trade and colonialism expect two things; apologies and reparations.  To General Assembly President Annalena Baerbock, the slave trade and slavery were “an affront to the very principles enshrined in the Charter of our United Nations.” 

In response to Kariuki’s claim about a hierarchy of historical atrocities, AU official Kyeretwie Osei argued that “the main point is not to introduce a hierarchy of crimes…. It is rather an attempt to properly situate that particular chapter in history… how it was so world-breaking in its impact that it essentially created a platform for every atrocity and crime against humanity that then followed.”

The focus on slave trade, argued Harvard University history student Jasmine Mickens, is a “distortion of reality” because the trade “was not a consensual joint business enterprise.” She noted the systematic “efforts to erase history”. The US, asserted Mahama, was engaging in the ‘erasure’ of history through increasing censorship of teaching the “truth of slavery, segregation and racism… These policies are becoming a template for other governments and some private institutions…. At the very least, they are slowly normalizing the erasure.”

Trump is seemingly determined to reset American and world history by attacking universities and other institutions that he thinks portray the United States wrongly or appear to favor the Democrats.

To obtain compliance, he adopted several strategies to instill fear in educational institutions. He accused universities of advancing “wokism” and forced them to close programs that he dislikes.

He fired over 1,200 Department of Education workers as he ordered the closing of some education programs and returned them to the states or local communities.” His Department of Transport cancelled grants to universities that supposedly “advance a radical DEI and green agenda that were both wasteful and ran counter to the transportation priorities of the American people.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed that universities had become “woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination…. We cannot and will not continue to send our most capable officers into graduate programs that undermine the very values they have sworn to uphold."

Many universities succumbed and tried to espouse Trumpism in higher education. Fear akin to McCarthyism of the 1950s crept in as he cuts federal funds to specified universities that do not bend to his will.

Probably fearing to incur Trump’s wrath, Lincoln University of Pennsylvania suddenly cancelled, without good reason, a ceremony in which the university was to award Mahama an honorary doctorate. Times are different from when Lincoln University had educated anti-colonialist Kwame Nkrumah and had, in the early 1950s, fought to protect Mugo Gatheru from deportation because of alleged Mau Mau connections.

Harvard, among the victims of Trump’s cuts, went to court. A federal judge found that Trump had engaged in “targeted, ideologically motivated assault” on Harvard. Trump also ordered a review Smithsonian Institute and other museums supposedly for showing issues of slavery and civil rights struggles instead of glorifying American achievements. To Trump, therefore, talking of the crime of slavery and slave trade was to engage in unacceptable ‘wokism’.

For special reasons, Argentina, Israel, and the United States voted against declaring slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” All three are led by men associated with the New Right Movement.

Israel sides with the US which always backs Israel irrespective of what. Argentina, having wiped out Native Americans and orchestrated genocide against its black people, mostly former slaves, who at one time comprised between 30% and 50% of population, imagines itself to be European.

In 1848, Domingo Faustini Sermiento had dismissed black people as fertilizer and “parasites attached to the leafy tree of freedom.” On becoming president, 1868-1874, Sarmiento mounted systematic erasure of former slaves physically and mentally. As refuge for post-World War II German Nazis, the whitening mentality was properly entrenched in Argentina such that former President Carlos Menem could declare that “in Argentina, Blacks do not exist.” In November 2023, Argentina elected a New Right politician as president, Javier Milei, who became, Trump said, Trump’s favorite president. Argentina voted to oppose the UN resolution on slave trade as a crime against humanity.  

Trump, having little regard for the UN or international law, went against what Mahama termed “healing and reparatory justice.” Despite an overwhelming 123 UN members voting for the resolution, Trump opposed equating slave trade with international crime. The US seemingly used similar arguments as Britain. Stating that the UN “was not founded to advance narrow specific interests and agendas,” US UN Deputy Ambassador Dan Negrea adopted Kariuki type of argument and declared that the US “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred” and rejected the “attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy.”  

The UN Resolution, though not binding, showed a clear geopolitical cleavage between mostly two sides. On one side were those who believe they are part of the Conceptual West that had organized and benefited from the slave trade. They do not want to admit guilt and therefore have the responsibility of paying reparation. They voted either to abstain or to oppose. On the other side were victims of slavery and colonialism voting to have recognition of the crimes and try to rectify the wrongs through reparation. It is a struggle between those harping to heal an atrocious past and those who stress Kariuki’s ‘law of relevant time’ doctrine in order to downplay the atrocities.  

Prof Munene is an expert in history and international relations