Ghana is mounting an assertive diplomatic drive at the United Nations to secure formal recognition of the transatlantic slave trade as one of the gravest crimes against humanity, arguing that the world has yet to fully confront its enduring legacy.

At a high-level gathering on reparatory justice in New York, former president John Dramani Mahama framed the slave trade as a system built on the deliberate dehumanization of Africans. He said that centuries of forced displacement, violence and exploitation created structural inequalities that still shape global power, wealth and opportunity.

Ghana has submitted a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly that seeks to move beyond symbolic condemnation. The text, according to officials familiar with the process, calls for explicit recognition of the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity and urges states to deepen education, memorialization and concrete measures to address its consequences.

Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa stressed that the initiative is not an attempt to rank human suffering, but to secure overdue acknowledgment and dignity for millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants. He rejected arguments that slavery belongs solely to the past, warning that treating it as a closed chapter erases the historical roots of contemporary racism, economic marginalization and social exclusion.

Ghana’s campaign is closely tied to its broader role as a symbolic gateway to the African diaspora. Building on projects such as heritage tourism and return initiatives, the government is expanding efforts to document slave routes, preserve coastal forts and castles and digitize archival records. Officials say these measures are intended both to strengthen the evidentiary basis for international action and to give descendants of enslaved people fuller access to their own history.

The proposed resolution is expected to spark intense debate among UN member states, particularly on questions of responsibility, reparations and the form that redress should take. Ghanaian diplomats are working with Caribbean and African partners, as well as civil society groups, to build a broad coalition in support of the measure.

For Accra, the push at the UN is part moral reckoning, part political statement: that the global order cannot claim to uphold human rights while leaving one of history’s most brutal systems of exploitation insufficiently named, remembered and repaired.