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In December 2016, various partisan web sites posted articles whose headlines declared that the United Nations, led by President Barack Obama, had ordered or demanded that the United States pay reparations to all African Americans for slavery. None of these articles, however, contained any actual reporting that matched these claims. Freedom Daily, for example, ran what was essentially an editorial masquerading as a news report: The only part of the article that states anything resembling a fact is the first paragraph, wherein it's claimed that a United Nations panel concluded that the U.S. owes reparations to descendants of American slaves. The United Nations' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent presented just such a conclusion to the U.N. Human Rights Council in September 2016. There was nothing legally binding about the panel's opinion, however. The United Nations doesn't have the authority to force the United States to do its bidding. Moreover, the United Nations isn't led by U.S. President Barack Obama (the current Secretary-General of the U.N. is Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, to be succeeded as of January 2017 by António Guterres of Portugal). Nor has President Obama expressed support for the idea of reparations — he has repeatedly argued against it, in fact, as exemplified in this statement from 2007: Although the idea of reparations for slavery is frequently (and hotly) debated across America, has been for years, and surely will be for many to come, there exists neither a plan for implementing them nor the expectation that such a plan will come to pass in the foreseeable future, much less immediately.
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