Earlier this month the United Nations passed Resolution A/80/L.48: Commemoration of the abolition of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, a motion proposed by the African Union and co-sponsored by 54 African states.

The vote was 123-3, with 52 abstentions. Argentina, Israel and the United States were the three members voting against the resolution. The United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union abstained. As did Canada.

Why, one might ask, would anyone abstain from a motion commemorating the abolition of slavery? Isn’t it just motherhood?

The problem lies in that last part referring to the “transatlantic slave trade.” The African slave trade had a long history with a number of players. This motion singles out the part played by the Europeans, pointedly ignoring the other villains. The Europeans could hardly oppose such a motion, but they weren’t about to support the blame being laid entirely on them.

The Arabs ran slaves out of sub-Saharan Africa for centuries before the Europeans got involved, and continued for well after the Europeans banned the practice. (The Arab states voted for the motion.) And the Arabs partnered with Africans who eagerly sold other Africans into bondage. The British Empire and English families profited from the trade, as did African kingdoms and African families.

Indeed this is what alerted the Europeans to the nefarious trade. When Portuguese explorers ventured down the west coast of Africa, they encountered thriving slave markets and saw an opportunity. Others followed.

However, the Europeans ultimately did something unique. Slavery had been an acceptable practice throughout history in all parts of the world. In North America, for example, it was practiced long before the Europeans showed up.

Then came the Enlightenment, which flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. It introduced the novel idea that all people should be treated equally, an idea that made slavery an abomination. The idea filtered into the consciences of Europeans and one empire after another banned the trade. The British not only abolished slavery, but they campaigned globally against it, including in those African kingdoms that persisted in the practice.

The UN motion included at least one other statement that cannot be left unchallenged. It declared “the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity.”

Ranking atrocities is rather distasteful in itself (mine’s bigger than yours?), but this declaration is questionable in any case. If one is to rank such things, surely the Holocaust reaches the greatest height of sheer evil.

About two million victims died on the Atlantic slave voyages (the dreaded Middle Passage) and in their first year in the Americas. The Holocaust took the lives of six million Jews and to that we might add other victims, including Soviet POWs, Poles, Roma, and disabled people, among others.

Furthermore, the transatlantic slave trade lasted 400 years, the Holocaust claimed its victims within a dozen. And where the slave victims were not intentional—they were valuable assets after all—the Holocaust victims were deliberate attempts to eliminate entire groups of people. In legal terminology, the former might be considered manslaughter, the latter first degree murder. And where slavery had been legal and acceptable, the Holocaust was, in its time and place, cold-blooded mass murder. In magnitude, intensity and intent, the Holocaust was much the graver crime against humanity.

Indeed, we might ask, did the slavers even do anything wrong? By our standards, of course they did. But we can only sensibly judge those of other times and places through their eyes and by their standards. We can deplore slavery with all its cruelty whenever and wherever it was practiced, but to judge those who practiced it by our standards is meaningless both morally and historically.

Who, after all, decides what is right or wrong? Essentially, it is the society of a particular time and place. Those who look to a higher authority in the case of slavery might be disappointed. Both Christianity and Islam accepted slavery. Christ had no problem with it and Muhammad kept slaves himself. Christianity’s greatest proselytizer, St. Paul, instructed slaves to serve their masters faithfully. God, it seems, was fine with slavery, at least until the Enlightenment corrected His error.

The UN motion speaks of apologies and reparations. But who is to apologize and who is to make reparations? Arabs, Europeans and Africans all participated and shared in the profits. And if they did nothing that offended the moral standards of their societies, does it make any more sense to demand apologies and reparations than it does to make judgements?

In any case, the motion will have little success eliciting apologies and reparations. There are no doubt residual inequalities between and within nations inherited from slavery. As there are from many practices that we now consider wrong. But for something that was neither wrong nor illegal in its time, it would be quite a challenge to ask today’s citizens of those nations who practiced it to apologize and pay for something that happened centuries ago and they had nothing to do with.

Those were slave times. Everyone was involved, from the Americas to Africa to Europe to the Middle East to Asia. The transatlantic slave trade may have been the most extensive only because the European empires were the most advanced technologically and could do everything on a grander scale. And they found no shortage of Africans eager to sell their black brothers and sisters to the highest bidder.

On the other hand, led by the British, the European empires recognized their sins and turned the tide of history, for the first time making anti-slavery a universal value of humanity. That, surely, earns them some credit in the grand scheme of things.

The African states that sponsored Resolution A/80/L.4 could, rather than rummage through history to point fingers and rank atrocities, focus on making their continent a beacon for human rights today. They have a lot of work to do.