United Nations
General Assembly
A/RES/61/19
Distr.: General
29 January 2007
Sixty-first session
Agenda item 155
Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 28 November 2006
[without reference to a Main Committee (A/61/L.28 and Add.1)]
61/19. Commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the
abolition of the transatlantic slave trade
The General Assembly,
Reaffirming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1 which proclaimed
that no one shall be held in slavery or servitude and that slavery and the slave trade
shall be prohibited in all their forms,
Recalling that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the
fifteenth and late nineteenth centuries, involved the forced transportation of millions
of Africans as slaves, mostly from West Africa to the Americas, thereby enriching
the imperial powers of the time,
Honouring the memory of those who died as a result of slavery, including
through exposure to the horrors of the middle passage and in revolt against and
resistance to enslavement,
Recognizing that the slave trade and slavery are among the worst violations of
human rights in the history of humanity, bearing in mind particularly their scale and
duration,
Deeply concerned that it has taken the international community almost
two hundred years to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade are a crime
against humanity and should always have been so,
Recalling that slavery and the slave trade were declared a crime against
humanity by the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination,
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August
to 8 September 2001, 2
Acknowledging that the slave trade and the legacy of slavery are at the heart of
situations of profound social and economic inequality, hatred, bigotry, racism and
prejudice, which continue to affect people of African descent today,
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1
2
06-49557
Resolution 217 A (III).
See A/CONF.189/12 and Corr.1, chap. I.