Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships, Jamaica’s ‘second chance’ Fifa World Cup qualifying campaign, post-Hurricane Melissa recovery, the just-concluded Budget Debate, and much else, means its easy to miss.

But among the most important stories this week has been the United Nations General Assembly vote to recognise the kidnapping of Africans, their transportation across the Atlantic, and enslavement in the Americas as the “gravest crime against humanity”.

News networks remind us that the vote in favour by 123 countries, including the African Union and the Caribbean Community, carries no legal weight.

And its no accident that the countries which benefited most from the enslavement of Africans — with wealth accruing to this day — declined to support the resolution which was moved by Ghana.

We are told that the United States, supported by Israel and Argentina, were the member countries to vote against.

Fifty-two others, including Britain and the European Union, abstained.

Britain and European Union member countries, including France, Holland, Portugal, and Spain, were the leading European colonial powers to execute and benefit from slavery and the slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Available evidence suggests the slave-worked enterprises in the Caribbean and wider Americas were cornerstones for the great Industrial Revolution which transformed Europe and North America.

We do not know how many millions of Africans were kidnapped, chained, shackled, and crammed into unspeakably unsanitary, slow-moving sailing ships for the journey across the Atlantic, which could stretch in excess of three months.

Nor do we know how many died. Some say as many as two million Africans may have been buried at sea over that 400-year period.

The infamous story of the Zong slave ship which arrived in Black River in the 1780s tells us that 122 Africans were thrown overboard by crew members for various reasons, supposedly including fear of disease. In the case of the Zong and other such ships, captives often chose to jump to their deaths.

Common sense tell us that the fittest were the ones to survive the transatlantic journey.

The legacy of slavery haunts us to this day.

Its a matter of record that in the British Caribbean slave owners were richly compensated when their slaves — their property — were freed.

The ex-slaves got nothing but the right to struggle for survival.

That last largely explains the disproportionately high levels of poverty and landlessness among their descendants in today’s Jamaica.

The psychological negatives are also still with us, including low self-esteem, which triggers skin-bleaching.

Let’s not forget Africa. In the words of UN General Assembly President Annalena Baerbok, the continent was “hollowed out”, robbed of potentially its best people.

Immediate material benefits won’t flow from this UN vote. But it is a significant step towards healing and reparation for historical wrongs unrivalled in human history.

That push must continue with unrelenting purpose. Under no circumstances should it be slowed or halted by self-servingly hypocritical and dishonest chatter disguised as intellectual reasoning.