The UN’s landmark declaration on the enslavement of Africans rests on a legal weld that cannot bear its weight. Yet the stronger case for reparations was in the text all along; but states have chosen not to lead with it.
Meeting in Accra on 19 June 2026 to implement the United Nations General Assembly’s declaration on the enslavement of Africans, states affirmed that “the obligation to compensate exists as a matter of international law.” However, the declaration itself, Resolution A/RES/80/250 of 25 March 2026, adopted by 123 votes to three with 52 abstentions, was more conservative in its phrasing.
Its preamble reaffirms the general law of state responsibility, under which states must make full reparation for internationally wrongful acts. Its operative text notes that reparations have been provided for other grave crimes elsewhere, and records only “with concern” that no comprehensive framework exists here. The Assembly states the rule and registers the gap, without saying that this conduct engaged the rule or that any state owes reparation.
The Accra Commitments advance three propositions: that the conduct is the gravest crime against humanity and a violation of peremptory norms; that such violations generate obligations erga omnes; and that the obligation to compensate falls within international law. Each is defensible standing alone. Only the second is presented as following from the first, whereas the third is not derived at all, arriving as a further affirmation rather than a conclusion. The gap falls where a doctrine of international criminal law is asked to sustain a conclusion about what states owe.
Two Regimes Welded at a Single Clause
The resolution speaks in two registers at once. In the criminal register, it declares the conduct the gravest crime against humanity, notes that states parties to the Rome Statute have codified enslavement as such a crime, and reaffirms that the crimes attract no statutory limitation. In the register of state responsibility, it recognises violations of jus cogens, norms from which no derogation is permitted under Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and imports the articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts by name.
The two are joined by one preambular clause. A preamble sets out the premises on which the operative paragraphs rest; those paragraphs are where the Assembly acts. Taking note of the principle that “a crime does not rot”, the Assembly affirms that there can be no statutory limitations for crimes against humanity “and that grave crimes generate continuing obligations until addressed through truth, justice and reparation”. That sentence carries the entire temporal argument, and it is a splice rather than an inference. It is confined to the preamble: none of the sixteen operative paragraphs repeats it.
Imprescriptibility, codified in the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, removes a procedural bar to prosecuting individuals. It answers whether a person may still be tried. It says nothing about whether a state was bound by an obligation at the time the conduct occurred; that question is governed by Article 13 of the articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts. Lifting a bar does not manufacture an obligation that never bound anyone. Accra’s final proposition compounds the difficulty. Article 48 confines obligations erga omnes, i.e., those owed to the international community as a whole, to the question of who may invoke responsibility, not whether it exists or what it requires.
The Objection That Was Mistaken for Pedantry
This discrepancy is why the abstaining states fastened on a word. The European Union objected that the use of superlatives “is not legally accurate” because “gravest” implies “a hierarchy among atrocity crimes, when no legal hierarchy between crimes against humanity exists”. Germany abstained on similar grounds, citing intertemporal considerations, but went further by adding that the text risks pre-empting negotiations on a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Humanity.
That second remark gives the game away. Germany was not quarrelling about adjectives. It was identifying the body of law to which the characterisation belongs, and observing that the Assembly was making it elsewhere. “Gravest crime against humanity” is a classification in international criminal law, and states are settling that category’s content in a conference of plenipotentiaries convened by the Assembly itself, whose first preparatory session met two months before the declaration. The objection was to the forum, not the wording.
Supporters heard it differently. The International Service for Human Rights replied that the designation does not amount to an “Olympics of oppression” but a recognition of the crime’s unique scale, duration and legacy. In other words, it treated the objection as a moral complaint about ranking suffering. Read against the instrument’s structure, it was not. It was an attack on the load-bearing weld. If “gravest crime against humanity” is not a legal category, the imprescriptibility riding on it has nothing to attach to, and the bridge across the intertemporal objection gives way. The United Kingdom said as much in plainer terms, that intertemporality and non-retroactivity “cannot be circumvented by recourse to the concept of ‘continuing harms.’”
The Argument They Already Have
What makes this predicament more than just a technical complaint is that a stronger claim is already written into both texts. The resolution’s preamble underscores the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and records that the legacies of enslavement persist today as structural racism and racial inequality. Its operative provisions call for changes to laws, programmes and services to address racism and systemic discrimination. Accra reaffirms the same Convention and urges reform of criminal justice systems to address systemic racism against people of African descent.
A claim pleaded that way is a claim about present breaches of obligations that are presently in force and owed to living people. It never meets intertemporality at all, because it never asks what bound anyone in the past, and that question has no single answer. The resolution’s own preamble runs from the Barbados slave code of 1661, when the enslaving power was writing chattel status into its domestic law, and no international prohibition is seriously arguable, to the Congress of Vienna declaration of 1815, in which the same powers pronounced the trade repugnant to the principles of humanity. The objection is close to unanswerable at the first date and considerably weaker at the second.
A claim that invokes intertemporality must therefore be run century by century; a claim about present discrimination need not be run at all. It also attracts no objection about hierarchy, because it does not need the superlative. It is the argument that survives contact with the abstainers’ reservations, and it is the one both instruments decline to lead with. The reason is not obscure. The present-discrimination claim vindicates the descendants; it does not vindicate the ancestors, nor does it require any state to say that its past actions were a crime.
That is a deliberate choice. A claim built on present discrimination could be won, and would deliver something to people now living. The claim as pleaded must first repair a join that does not hold, but it asks what the movement exists to ask: not what is owed to the descendants, but what was done to the ancestors. International law answers the first question well and the second badly.
Bhavya Johari is a Lecturer and Assistant Dean at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, and an Assistant Editor at the Jindal Global Law Review. He is also a Consulting Director at IDIA (Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access), a national non-profit that supports students from underprivileged and marginalised backgrounds in accessing legal education. He holds an LL.M. from Melbourne Law School, where he was an Alex Chernov Scholar and received the Danny Sandor Prize in Children’s Rights, and a B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) from NALSAR University of Law, graduating with ten gold medals conferred by the President of India.
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