A United Nations watchdog has declared that countries are legally required to provide comprehensive reparations to people of African descent for the enduring harms of the transatlantic slave trade — marking what experts are calling a significant shift in how international law addresses the legacy of slavery.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), an 18-member panel of independent rights experts, published the guidance on Monday in a document known as General Recommendation-40. The committee, which monitors implementation of the 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination — a treaty with 182 state parties, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Portugal — concluded that its obligations require countries to actively address the continuing consequences of slavery. Critically, the document rejects the legal argument known as the intertemporality principle, which holds that states cannot be held responsible for acts that were not prohibited under international law at the time they occurred. The committee argues that, regardless of how the original acts are legally characterised, countries remain bound by their present-day obligations under the convention to dismantle the structural inequalities slavery produced.

Pela Boker-Wilson, a Liberian human rights lawyer and committee member who helped draft the document, described the guidance as