Forced Population Transfers, Mass Expulsions, and Migration: The Law and its Claw (original) (raw)
Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights, 2018
The debate around reparations for the transatlantic slave trade has been discussed for centuries with no end in sight. This article does not intend to cover the historical or political aspects of this debate, but instead to shed more light on the legal options with regards to reparations. In particular this article examines the role of politically negotiated reparations in transitional societies and the limits of avenues of redress in international law. Key to such discussions is the identification of eligible victims and appropriate measures of redress from responsible actors. With the so-called ‘transatlantic slave trade’ the passage of time has strained legal principles of causation to identify those victimised by atrocities of the past. Instead this article argues that reparations beyond the international law construct can be politically negotiated to at least acknowledge the past and offer some symbolic measures of redress to victimised populations of transatlantic enslavement.
Suppressing Slavery Under Customary International Law
The Italian Yearbook of International Law Online, 2000
Although it is widely believed that slavery is a phenomenon that has been lost in the fogs of the past, the contemporary world is witnessing a widespread return to this intolerable activity, which represents a violation of basic human rights, and may be comparable, in its quantitative dimension, to the African slave trade that was perpetrated by the Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This reviviscence is occurring despite the fact that the last three centuries have been characterised by the Age of the Enlightenment' and of the emergence of the social idea of the human being following the two devastating world wars, with the subsequent development of the international human rights movement. Nonetheless, today the globalisation of economic and interpersonal relationships is leading to a new worldwide spread of slavery, the variety and cruelty of which is enough to reach the extreme limits of human degradation and humiliation. This spread is mainly 1 The philosophers of the Age of the Enlightenment abjured slavery as a void right, since it was considered "not only unlawful, but [also]... absurd and illogical. The words slavery and law are contradictory and annul each other" (see RousSEAU, 11 Contratto Sociale, Milano, 1962 (Italian translation of the original Du Contract Social ou Principes du droit politigue, Amsterdam, 1762), p. 43 ff.). This view reversed that expressed in 1625 by Grotius, who wrote that "which may be done to a slave with impunity according to the law of nations differs widely from that which natural reason permits to be done" (see GROTius, De jure belli ac pacis, 1625, III, p. 762). However, from a purely philosophical point of view, the concept of the social absurdity of slavery has not been universally shared by all scholars. The famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, in his book Phenomenology of the Spirit, considered slavery to be a natural consequence, and a way of settlement, of the fight between the two originally contrasting human self-consciences: the subjective and the objective. When one of the two consciences is subjugated by the other, in a condition of servile status, the master limits himself to enjoying the "objects of consumption" produced by the slave, while the latter shapes the things he works on, keeping them out of their natural condition. Being thus subjected to work without the opportunity for choice, the subjugated conscience becomes able to suppress its impulses. Thus, slavery is viewed as a phase of human emancipation, that leads to the liberation of the human conscience. Although the subjugated conscience is at this point "unhappy", according to Hegel this process constitutes the necessary step for leading humanity to the light of reason (see HEGEL, Phanomenologie des Geistes, Jena, 1807, Italian translation by CICERO, Fenomenologia dello Spirito, Milano, 1995, p. 283 ff.). produced by the progressive and apparently unstoppable increment of the social disparity between rich and poor peoples,2 which magnifies the opportunities for exploitation under conditions of slavery. The vast increase of the phenomenon of forced prostitution and sex tourism to the detriment of children constitutes only one manifestation of such a reality.3 3 Although in recent decades slavery has evolved in a variety of new forms (referred to in this article as "contemporary forms of slavery"), the phenomenon in its historical and traditional meaning (the so-called "chattel slavery") is still far from being eradicated, especially in some developing countries. In particular, traditional slavery practices are widespread in Sudan and Mauritania, both of which are signatories to the two multilateral international conventions regarding slavery that are in force at present.4 In Mauritania, slavery has been formally abolished in law, but it still exists in fact.s As the US Department of State acknowledges, there are actually about ninety thousand members of the local black racial groups who live in the country as slaves, belonging to the properties of Arab or Berber masters. They are z To have an idea of the progressive increase of social disparities at a worldwide level, it can be pointed out that, while in 1960 the economic ratio between the richest 20 per cent and poorest 20 per cent of the World's population was 30 to 1 (i.e. the income of the richest 20 per cent part of the world's population was 30 times larger than the income of the poorest 20 per cent), in 1996 it was 60 to 1; thus, in a period of only twenty-six years the economic "disequilibrium'' between the richest and the poorest part of the world's population has redoubled. This data must be considered in the context of an international system in which 50 per cent of the global world's income belongs to 6 per cent of the total population, while 85 per cent of such income belongs to 23 per cent of the world's population (see "La schiavitu oggi", Nibai, August
Korean Journal of International and Comparative Law, 2013
Between 1932 and the end of the Second World War, the Japanese Government and the Japanese Imperial Army forced over 200,000 women into sexual slavery in rape centres throughout Asia. The majority of the victims were from Korea, but many were also taken from China, Indonesia, the Philippines and other Asian countries under Japanese control. There has been no real redress for these injustices: no prosecutions of guilty perpetrators, no acceptance of full legal responsibility by the Government of Japan, and no compensation paid to the surviving victims. The present paper focuses primarily on the issue of state responsibility and the situation of the Korean survivors. The study concludes that Japan has a continuing legal liability for grave violations of human rights and humanitarian law, violations that amount in their totality to crimes against humanity. The study establishes, contrary to Japanese Government arguments, that (a) the crime of slavery accurately describes the system est...
Slavery and Slave Trade: Steps toward Eradication
1972
Instruments of the United Nations, U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 32/4 (1967). 3 Nanda, The United Nations and Regional Arrangements to Implement Human Rights, 21 DEPAuL L. REV.-(1972). 4 M. MOSKowiTz, THE POLITICS AND DYNAMICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 98-99 (1968) succinctly poses the problem: [I]nternational human rights is still waiting for its theoretician to systematize the thoughts and speculations on the subject and to define desirable goals. Intelligent truisms do not necessarily add up to a theory. No one has yet
The legacies of slavery in and out of Africa
IZA Journal of Migration, 2016
The Legacies of Slavery in and out of Africa * The slave trades out of Africa represent one of the most significant forced migration experiences in history. In this paper I illustrate their long-term consequences. I first consider the influence of the slave trade on the "sending" countries in Africa, with attention to their economic, institutional, demographic, and social implications. Next I evaluate the consequences of the slave trade on the "receiving" countries in the Americas. Here I distinguish between the case of Latin America and that of the United States. For the latter, I further discuss the subsequent migration experiences of the Second Middle Passage, when African slaves were transported, again forcibly, from the coastal regions to the inland, and of the Great Migration, when as free people they chose to leave the deep South for the Northern cities.