Slavery surely has no grades?

Looking at the record of this week’s United Nations General Assembly vote on declaring the transatlantic African slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, you can almost draw a line between “North and South”… the geopolitical shorthand for delineating between the “developed” and the “developing” world.

The US, Israel and Argentina voted against the measure, but there were 52 abstentions, mostly from the European Union countries, as well as the UK and its former colonies, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The logical reaction would be: that would be expected from those responsible for the crime or those who colonised most of the globe.

And, while there is validity in that assessment, there is also greater nuance.

Those who voted against the declaration and many who abstained argued that by making transatlantic slavery the “gravest” crime against humanity, the UN was seeking to “rank” evil into greater and lesser.

But perhaps the reason most voted against or abstained was because the declaration called for reparations – “restorative justice” from those nations who profited from it.

However, the US said it “does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred”.

The latter argument speaks to a common theme among those who either defend the past, or say that victims and their descendants should “just get over it”.

Yet slavery, like apartheid, was, as the declaration rightly puts it, something which “struck at the core of personhood, broke up families, and devastated communities”.

So it should never be forgotten. But the strangest part of the declaration is the focus on transatlantic slavery when millions of Africans were sold as part of a trade run by Arabs, in collaboration with African rulers.

Does this mean therefore that there are now different grades of slavery?