Determined to draft a text before the official end of the conference Friday, participants worked until Saturday to draft an agreement. An apology for slavery and "a recognition" of the plight of Palestinians in Israel were both part of the final document.

During a UN full vote on the Durban Declaration, South Africa's Foreign Minister and Conference President, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who drafted the language on Palestine, was reportedly close to tears as she voted to include the statements, saying that it was right to include them.

This issue, a subject of much controversy was what caused the U.S. delegation and Israeli delegations to leave the conference and brought many more delegations, including the European Union to threaten departure. The final text adopted was much less controversial than the earlier drafts. In the end, an excerpt of the text read as follows.

"We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognise the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state. And we recognise the right to security for all states in the region, including Israel, and call upon all states to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion."

An apology for slavery was included and brokered by the European Union--a concession that many did not expect to make it into the text. While the text did not go as far as to offer any compensation for slavery, many representatives from African nations and of African descendant felt that this opened the door to continue the discussion on reparations.

Some Nongovernmental Organizations (NGO's) were disappointed that the text did not single out groups of African descent for a specific apology. Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel who is leader of the European Union delegation stressed that the apology was on "moral grounds" to avoid any stipulation that this was an opening for reparations. A $2 billion bill has already been introduced in the US by a Namibian representative against three firms for German colonial atrocities.

An excerpt from the UN declaration on slavery: "We acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade, including the trans-Atlantic slave trade, were appalling tragedies in the history of humanity not only because of their abhorrent barbarism but also in terms of their magnitude, organized nature and especially their negation of the essence of the victims and further acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent, Asians and people of Asian descent and indigenous peoples were victims of these acts and continue to be victims of their consequences."

Concerned about losing momentum from the conference and dissatisfied with the overall tone of arguing instead of negotiating and eliminating issues instead of debating them, a post-Durban group has been put together by the NGOs to examine what can be done after Durban to continue the flow of discussion on the issues of racism, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination.