Full Text: Mahama’s speech at UN before vote on slave trade resolution

I am addressing the General Assembly on behalf of the African group regarding the draft resolution entitled Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Charter Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity.

In September last year, at the 80th session of the General Assembly, I stood in this exact place and served notice that Ghana would move a motion to declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. This current draft resolution is the result of months of consultation and consensus building by continental bodies, nations, experts, scholars, and jurists, with the sole aim of achieving a united front and grounding the final outcome in truth, compassion, and moral conscience, remembrance, education, and dialogue.

So, today we come together in solemn solidarity to affirm truth and pursue a route to healing and reparative justice. The adoption of this resolution serves as a safeguard against forgetting. It also challenges the enduring scars of slavery.

Madam President, let me conclude with two significant quotes by two great leaders of history, one of them white and one of them black. The former President of the United States of America, Theodore Roosevelt, said, and I quote, with a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness. For to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

Again, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King also reminds us, and I quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. We’ve traveled this long road, each step guided by a desire to be better and to do better, each step bringing us closer to the kind of world we would want to leave for our children. And so, delegates, on this beautiful day in March, we’re called to stand on the right side of history.

Let it be recorded that when history beckoned, we did what was right for the memory of the millions who suffered the indignity of the slave trade and those who continue to suffer racial discrimination. Let our vote on this resolution restore their dignity and humanity. I thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you.