The UN Passes a Worse Than Empty Gesture in Respect of Slavery

Nearly 50 million persons live under conditions of slavery around the world these days, the United Nations reports. Such reports rarely make headlines because the world body is too busy grandstanding. This week its general assembly passed a resolution calling for America and others to pay reparations to descendants of slaves of yore. As the American mission to the UN made clear, this resolution is a “perfect example of the UN’s unseriousness.”“Today, we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice,” President John Dramani Mahama of Ghana, which initiated the exercise, said. A majority of 123 of the UN’s 193 members voted for the resolution. European fence sitters were among 52 abstainers. Only Argentina, Israel, and America dared to oppose the empty gesture. Among the supporters were North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, and Saudi Arabia, which the 2023 global slavery index ranks top violators. “There is a very real and current problem in human trafficking and human slavery. We back every effort to address them,” the American UN delegation wrote in explaining its vote. “Instead, the UN passed a resolution condemning the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries and urging reparations today, centuries later. Not clear from whom or to whom.” Can funds even be transferred to descendants of slaves? How? Mauritanians indeed were victimized during the slave trade in past centuries. Must today’s America compensate its leaders who even now enslave darker-skinned countrymen according to long-held local prejudices? In 1981 Mauritania became the world’s last country to officially abolish slavery. Bad habits, though, die hard and conditions of slavery are too often maintained. What sense does it make for American funds to be paid to such African countries?Yet a similar idea is pushed by California legislators. Last year they created a state agency dedicated to processing reparations claims for descendants of slaves. New York State is also considering such compensations, and Cincinnati is considering a tax on marijuana users to fund reparations. What in the world is the logic of using such a tax for reparations? And beyond that, what is an African-American stoner to make of it?As our Luke Funk reports, the UN resolution was backed by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Yet would our laws even allow compensating past slavery victims? America “does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred,” the U.S. representative to the UN’s Economic and Social Council, Dan Negrea, said before this week’s vote at the general assembly. “I welcome the steps some countries are taking to apologize for their role in the evil of slavery,” Secretary General Antonio Guterres says. We would be more impressed if Mr. Guterres apologized for further sharpening Turtle Bay’s anti-American and anti-Israel turn. For that he, rather than his Portuguese forefathers, is responsible. The resolution he champions is “the type of unhelpful activity that gives the UN a bad name,” the American UN mission writes.

The UN Passes a Worse Than Empty Gesture in Respect of Slavery

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