Legality v morality – a convenient farce

When those who race to plant their flag on the moral high ground and by the look of things – all over the moon – recast centuries of barbarism as lawful conduct, having first judged vast sections of humanity as savages and not fully human, the world is in serious trouble.

On March 25, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognise the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans as “the gravest crime against humanity.” Ghana, historically one of Africa’s largest trading posts, tabled the resolution, which also urged member states to apologise for the trade and consider contributing to a reparations fund.

One hundred and twenty-three countries voted in favour. Fifty-two abstained, including Britain and European Union member states. Three voted against: the United States, Israel and Argentina.

Both the resolution itself and its passage – at a time of growing international demands for reparations – provoked predictable reactions, particularly in Europe and the US. Familiar tropes resurfaced, including the following: Africans were complicit in their own enslavement; Arabs were enslavers too, so the trade was not uniquely transatlantic; slavery was legal until abolition, so there is no obligation to apologise or make reparations; Britain led the abolition movement, so why should it apologise; the British Empire was a force for good; reparatory justice unfairly burdens current generations with ancestral crimes; apology implies legal responsibility; and, finally, reparations are unaffordable and impractical – who would the money even go to?

Writing on X, Kemi Badenoch MP, leader of the UK’s Conservative opposition, exemplified this response:

“Russia, China, and Iran vote with others to demand trillions in reparations from UK taxpayers and the Labour government abstains. Britain led the fight to end slavery. Why didn’t Starmer’s representative vote against this? Ignorance or cowardice? We should not be paying for a crime we helped eradicate and still fight today.”

There are at least three fatal flaws in these arguments.

The most obvious is the claim that legality confers moral legitimacy. That “legal” trade was not a neutral system of commerce. It was the legalisation of murder, rape, torture, genocide, dehumanisation and the systematic destruction of the human spirit. It meant it was lawful to throw enslaved people overboard and claim insurance; lawful to annihilate native populations and seize their land; lawful to flog, maim or kill people for resisting bondage; lawful to rape at will; lawful to force the enslaved to brutalise one another as punishment and deterrence.

All of this – and more – was legal. And yet we are told it does not warrant reparatory justice.

Nor did that barbarism end with abolition legislation. It mutated. It fuelled the rise of pseudoscientific racism and eugenics in the 19th century, giving birth to racial hierarchies masquerading as theories of intelligence. These ideas spread far beyond the plantation, embedding themselves wherever enslaved Africans and their descendants lived, and they persist to this day in modern forms.

In the United States, this legacy shaped Jim Crow segregation, the normalisation of lynching, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s declaration in The Souls of Black Folk that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line.” It is evident in the abduction and lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, the civil rights struggle, and subsequent black resistance movements.

In Britain, it fed entrenched ideas of white supremacy and produced systemic, institutional and casual racism. It contributed to racist violence, including racially aggravated deaths involving law enforcement and immigration authorities, and gave rise to anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-fascist resistance movements. It also underpinned one of the most shameful domestic scandals of the postwar era: the shunting of disproportionate numbers of black children – mostly of African Caribbean heritage – into schools for the “educationally subnormal” on the basis of racially and class-biased intelligence testing.

However politically expedient it may seem for leaders in Britain or the United States to abstain from or oppose the UN resolution, or to refuse to apologise for African enslavement, they do so at their peril. The past they insist we cannot ask present generations to confront is the very force shaping our turbulent present and defining our future – both domestically and internationally.

This is especially true if Britain continues to demonise its African population, including its growing British-born black and global majority communities, while refusing to deal honestly with the legacies of empire and colonialism and miseducating its white population about the nation’s historic relationship with Africa and Asia.

Opposition to the resolution also rested on a further argument advanced by the US deputy ambassador to the UN, who warned against creating a “hierarchy of violations,” claiming that singling out African enslavement diminished the suffering of victims of other atrocities.

This is patently absurd. Treating radically unequal experiences as morally equivalent does not create justice, just as treating everyone the same does not create equality. Even a cursory examination of the scale, duration, universality and intergenerational impact of African enslavement confirms its unique brutality. To recognise this is not to diminish other atrocities or deny the suffering of their survivors.

Put bluntly, had the descendants of enslaved Africans been fully recognised by nation states as people whose lived realities are shaped by racism, colonialism and their structural legacies – or had they successfully forced that recognition – there would have been no need for this UN resolution.

That Britain abstained, and that the United States and Israel voted against it, should send a clear message to the Black Commonwealth – particularly Jamaica, given its geopolitical alliances – and ought to prompt serious reflection on who, even now, is prepared to acknowledge history honestly, and who is not.

Professor Augustine John is a human rights campaigner and honorary fellow at the UCL Institute of Education, University of London.