The BDS movement welcomes the UN General Assembly’s adoption, on 25 March 2026, of a historic resolution formally recognizing the transatlantic system of racialized chattel slavery as the “gravest crime against humanity” and calling for reparatory justice to address its enduring impacts.
Since its inception in 2005, the BDS movement has reaffirmed that the boycott of Israel constitutes part of the global struggle against racism and all forms of oppression. The movement has for over two decades strongly condemned apartheid, genocide, slavery, colonial exploitation and ethnic cleansing, which are crimes against humanity that are founded on racism and racial supremacy.
Beyond symbolic recognition and remembrance, the movement has consistently called for concrete steps to remedy these crimes, in particular through measures that hold material and economic consequences for the victims and perpetrators, including through fulfilling the rights of the victims of these crimes, including descendants, to full reparation.
Imperialism under a veneer of humanism
The geopolitical divide that characterized the vote on the resolution exposes the hypocrisy of the colonial West and testifies to the persistence of colonial-era power dynamics in the contemporary international order. The resolution passed by a decisive majority of 123 states, while the United States, Israel, and Argentina voted against it, and the European Union member-states and the United Kingdom expectedly abstained.
Instead of joining the global majority on the need for concrete steps—with material consequences—towards redress and reparation, the Western countries most implicated in chattel slavery and/or colonialism insist on isolating slavery as a superseded past, constraining international action in its regard to the realm of symbolic “remembrance.”
In its Explanation of Vote, the European Union (EU) defended its member states’ abstention, claiming—with its typical colonial hypocrisy and thinly-veiled racism—that the resolution’s designation of slavery as the “gravest” crime against humanity creates an unjustified hierarchy among atrocity crimes. It “risks undermining the harm suffered by all victims of these crimes,” the EU claimed. Echoing the same point, the US—the country currently engaging in unlawful aggression and countless war crimes, while openly stating it does not pretend to respect international humanitarian law—claimed in its note to be worried that the “assertion that some crimes against humanity are less severe than others objectively diminishes the suffering of countless victims and survivors of other atrocities throughout history.”
With their ostensible preoccupation with “all victims” of atrocity, the Western block attempts to conceal its imperialist interests behind a universalist, humanist façade.
Since the gradual extension of humanitarian protections to non-European peoples in the Inter-War and post-Second World War periods, various techniques were deployed to effectively re-deny legal protections to the peoples exposed to immense atrocities committed by Western colonial and neo-colonial powers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, not to mention to the indigenous nations in some of those western countries from the US to Australia. Entire frameworks (such as “sovereignty” and “counterterrorism”) and legal categories (such as “human shields” and “unlawful combatants”) were invented and reinterpreted by some Western powers, and endorsed by others, to guarantee not “all victims” were covered by international legal protections.
Meanwhile, most Western states have for eight decades acted—internally as well as externally, including through enacting national laws—towards placing a specific crime, the Holocaust, on top of all atrocity crimes, constructing anti-Jewish racism as a unique, distinct form of racial discrimination that sits on top of a hierarchy of racisms, and even an independent criminal category on its own that requires distinct laws, regulations and strategies. As progressive Jewish groups have affirmed, anti-Jewish racism must be fought “within, and as part of, broader struggles against oppression and for collective liberation.”
The ostensible western concern for “all victims” seems cynical once read against the backdrop of the stances of Western countries since the start of Israel’s livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in October 2023—between principal and secondary accomplices on the one hand, and passive bystanders on the other.
The pretense of “legality”
The second argument the Western countries presented in their Explanation of Vote was their insistence that the language of the resolution implies retroactive legal responsibility and reparations, and thus conflicts with established principles such as the non-retroactivity of international law. This position is no more than an instrumentalization of the principles of “legality” to obscure the Western bloc’s deep-seated racism and imperialist interests.
It ignores the continuing impact of inter-generational injustices on racialized communities in the contemporary world. These continue to impact sub-Saharan Africa particularly, among other regions, as they are compounded with new forms of colonial control, pillage and subjugation. The continuity of colonial practices and power dynamics in Africa, as well as of the impact of chattel slavery on the Africans and peoples of African descent, constitute appropriate legal grounds for the victims’ right to reparations under the international legal doctrines of “continuing breach” and “composite breach.”
Moreover, it rests on a pretension that the enterprise of Western colonialism took place at a time in which the immoral, inhuman, and unlawful character of chattel slavery was not well-established. This is legally and factually unfounded. Historical evidence shows that, already by the 1500s, slavery was indeed deemed immoral and illegal under the laws of affected Africans, the laws of enslaving countries, and the standards of international law at the time.
The US stated, “we do not accept this resolution’s assertion that historical facts from the 15th through 19th centuries constitute violations of jus cogens as that term is understood in contemporary international law.” This shameless distortion of questions of history, fact, and law conflates the codification of the concept of “jus cogens” (peremptory norms of international law) in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, with the actual existence of various customary international legal norms for centuries before the 1969 Vienna Convention. Certainly in connection with chattel slavery in particular, there is evidence of emerging customary norms prohibiting such a practice, such as the 1815 Congress of Vienna Declaration and the 1890 Brussels Conference Act.
Beyond actual, centuries-long knowledge of the immoral and unlawful character of slavery, the post-Second World War trials of Nazi officials for their atrocities resorted to a number of legal innovations that were applied retroactively. Thus, history shows that Western hegemons, under the leadership of the US itself, have indeed overstepped the principle of “non-retroactivity” when they wished, namely when the crimes in question were committed against European nations.
Absent any legal merits whatsoever, what remains of the invocation of “non-retroactivity” is Europe’s racism, hypocrisy, and selective understanding of justice. Under the pretense of technical legal concerns, Western countries hide their endeavour to obstruct redress—through tangible steps beyond rhetoric—in respect of their own crimes, which constituted the most heinous episodes in human history.
Concrete steps towards tangible redress
Unlike previous international statements characterized by their largely symbolic condemnations, this UNGA resolution proposes concrete steps and avenues towards remedying the harms of the system of slavery and confronting its continuities in the contemporary world. The resolution urges countries to enact effective measures including financial compensation and the return of cultural artifacts. Its vision of reparations also extends to formal acknowledgment of the scale and brutality of slavery, processes of reconciliation grounded in truth-telling and historical accountability, and structural reforms aimed at addressing the enduring global inequalities rooted in its legacy.
In view of this, this resolution is characterized by its treatment of slavery not merely as a series of historical atrocities that affected 15 million African men, women, and children during the era of colonialism, but as a system that continues to victimize tens of millions across the planet. It recognises “the profound and lasting impacts of the abhorrent regimes of slavery and colonialism and the persistence of racial discrimination and neo-colonialism on Africans and people of African descent and how this continues to cause immense suffering, cultural disruption, economic exploitation, emotional trauma and unending discrimination endured by Africans and people of African descent throughout history.”
The BDS movement regards this resolution as a significant step towards justice, reinvigorating global debates over historical accountability and reparations for the lasting legacy of slavery. It re-emphasizes that the same global struggle against international crimes founded on racism and racial supremacy encompasses the fulfillment of Palestinian refugees’ historical, internationally recognized rights. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine has made 68% of the Palestinian people refugees, who have for eight decades demanded and continue to demand their UN-stipulated rights of return and, indeed, reparations.
While the African Union has declared 2026-2036 as the AU Decade of Reparations, what matters now is: action. The recently adopted resolution by the UN General Assembly must be translated into practical policies and measures, and must also be reflected in state practice in the course of the ongoing negotiations for a treaty on the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity.