New York, New York - Human Rights Watch has once again called for reparations for the legacies of enslavement and anti-Black racism in a submission before the United Nations.

"Anti-Black racism stems in large part from racism engrained in the legacies of slavery, the slave trade and colonialism," HRW writes in a new filing to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

The US is a state party to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which guarantees "the right to seek... just and adequate reparation or satisfaction for any damage suffered as a result of [racial] discrimination."

Nevertheless, HRW notes that many governments continue to deny their obligation to provide reparations for the enduring legacies of enslavement.

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This obligation must extend beyond a formal apology, the organization argues, to full reparations shaped by meaningful consultations with impacted communities.

"Many governments that benefitted from colonialism, enslavement and the slave trade have yet to and in most cases refuse to genuinely reckon with past and current impacts of these legacies," HRW's report states.

"Any arguments that attempt to excuse atrocities including crimes against humanity or genocide based on arguments that the acts were legal at the time sets up a system of accountability that guarantees impunity for egregious rights abuses – which in many cases affected Black people."

To illustrate the need for comprehensive action, HRW highlighted two ongoing reparations struggles rooted in historic evils of anti-Black racism.

The first was the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, which saw hundreds of Black residents murdered in a white-supremacist terrorist attack on the city's Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a report in January describing the May 31-June 1, 1921, invasion of Greenwood as an attack "so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence."

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Yet the DOJ ruled out prosecution in the case, while the Oklahoma Supreme Court last year denied survivors a legal pathway for redress.

The second example concerned the forced displacement of the Indigenous Chagossians by the UK in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for a US military base on the island of Diego Garcia.

Many Chagossians descend from people enslaved on the African continent, taken in chains to the Chagos Islands via Madagascar, and forced to work on French and British coconut plantations.

To this day, Chagossians are prevented from returning to their homeland and remain largely locked out of negotiations on sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelagos, with HRW calling for full reparations for the ongoing crimes.

"The failure to account for the historic racial injustices of the legacies of slavery and colonialism has compounded the harm and fueled the persistence of racial inequality today," HRW states.

"As the two reparations cases have clearly demonstrated, and of which there are plenty more examples, the systems and structures that built these legacies, which were embedded in anti-Black racism, remain in place and lead to ongoing human rights violations."

Following its 2022 review of the US, CERD called for the creation of a federal reparations commission – a demand that has so far gone unanswered.