Appiagyei-Atua: Resolution ‘beautiful’ but hard to implement
University of Ghana professor raises doubts over legal force and great power cooperation despite 123-nation vote in favour
The jubilation that greeted the United Nations General Assembly’s landmark resolution on slavery and reparatory justice has been tempered by a sobering legal reality check from one of Ghana’s foremost scholars of international law, who warns that the distance between a UN resolution and meaningful accountability can be vast, and that the path ahead is far more complicated than the vote count might suggest.
Professor Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, a Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Ghana School of Law, raised pointed concerns about both the legal weight of the resolution and the realistic prospects of its implementation during an interview on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show on Thursday, March 26.
His analysis arrives just a day after President John Mahama hailed the resolution, which passed with 123 member states voting in favour, 3 against, and 53 abstentions, as a historic breakthrough and a platform for the continued pursuit of reparatory justice.
At the core of Prof Appiagyei-Atua’s concern is the institutional architecture through which the resolution was secured. While the UN General Assembly is widely regarded as the most democratically representative body within the United Nations system, where every member state, regardless of size or financial contribution, holds an equal vote, that democratic character comes with a fundamental legal limitation.
Decisions made through the General Assembly, he explained, do not carry the force of law. They are, in the language of international legal practice, recommendatory rather than binding, expressions of collective sentiment rather than enforceable obligations.
“When votes are cast on issues such as this, they are not binding, they are not legally binding,” he said, adding that the resolution, however symbolic its significance, ultimately falls into the category of a recommendation that states are free to act on, or ignore.
“My concern is the process… the means that the AU is adopting to deal with this matter, because going through the General Assembly system is something that has been done before,” he noted.
Prof Appiagyei-Atua also offered a more critical reading of the resolution’s voting pattern than the headline figure of 123 supporters might initially suggest. While only three countries formally voted against the resolution, 53 states chose to abstain, and the professor argued that abstentions should not be treated as neutrality.
“The abstention is more or less a diplomatic way of saying no to the resolution. So, I don’t see much difference between that and those who voted against,” he said.
The implication is significant. When abstentions are considered alongside outright opposition, the picture of international consensus behind the resolution becomes considerably less uniform, particularly when the abstaining and opposing countries include some of the world’s most powerful states, whose cooperation would be essential to any serious reparations framework.
To illustrate why he is not optimistic about the resolution’s practical impact, Prof Appiagyei-Atua turned to history, drawing a direct parallel with efforts made in the 1970s, when newly independent states pushed through the UN for a new international economic order that addressed issues linked to slavery and colonialism.
The outcome then, he noted, was instructive.
“It came to naught because the big powers, the former colonial masters, voted against it,” he said.
The structural dynamic he identified in that earlier episode mirrors the current situation closely, a numerical majority of nations, many of them from the Global South, driving a resolution forward, while the states with the greatest historical culpability and the greatest capacity to deliver reparations either oppose it or withhold their support through abstention.
Prof Appiagyei-Atua’s most sobering observation was perhaps his most fundamental, that even when international law is legally binding, enforcement against powerful states remains extraordinarily difficult. In the case of a resolution that carries no binding legal force whatsoever, the challenge is compounded further.
“Implementation is going to be difficult because the big powers voted against it or abstained. And that is how the UN General Assembly resolutions and declarations work,” he stated.
When asked directly whether the absence of great power support would translate into an absence of cooperation on implementation, his answer was unambiguous.
“Definitely, yes. They will not cooperate because it is not legally binding on them,” he said.
He went further, acknowledging that even legally binding instruments of international law struggle to produce compliance when the states in question are powerful enough to resist consequence.
“Even if it is legally binding, international law is difficult to implement. If they refuse to comply, there is nothing you can do against them because of the power they hold on the international plane,” he added.
Prof Appiagyei-Atua was not dismissive of the resolution’s symbolic importance, describing it as “beautiful”, but he was insistent that symbolic value and enforceable impact are two very different things, and that conflating them risks setting expectations that the current international legal architecture is simply not equipped to meet.
“These resolutions are passed… but implementation becomes difficult. That is the same situation we are in now,” he noted.
His analysis serves as a necessary counterweight to the celebratory tone that has surrounded the resolution, not to diminish what has been achieved, but to ensure that the energy behind the reparatory justice movement is directed with clear eyes towards the considerable obstacles that remain. The vote may have been historic. The work of translating it into anything tangible is only just beginning, and by the professor’s reckoning, it will require much more than a General Assembly majority to get there.
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