An “International Human Rights Comittee for Slavery”?

Abstract

It is certainly difficult to assess whether, and to what degree, international anti-slavery legislation has been successful. The facts are that in the nineteenth century, legal and religious motivations were conjoined with technical developments creating a situation in which the manpower problem came to differ in essentials from that which had sustained slavery, both in “exporter” and “importer” countries. In the result slavery was abolished west of the Atlantic, and with it slave trade on the western shores of Africa. It soon transpired, however, that the disintegration of the westward-bound trade only reinforced its eastward branch. Although attempts were made at an international level to extend to the East the western experience in abolition of the slave trade, they did not meet with full success, and, apart from the protection of women and minorities, abolition of slavery remains today the main problem of group protection confronting the United Nations Organization. At present, the U.N. is negotiating for its third set of “teeth” with which to confront this problem.The standing of the United Nations in this matter, is that of an Agent of Protection—a function which has in the last two hundred years or so developed in each case where international legislation related to groups of beneficiaries (such as slaves, minorities, prisoners-of-war, etc.) which have no independent standing as subjects of International Law, and therefore are incapable of negotiating for themselves (or through representatives appointed by them) the conditions of their protection in respect to sovereign States as obligatees, and even less of providing for a control of such protection and the obtention of remedial action. The range of effectiveness of such Agents of Protection is obviously indicated with the effective influence which such agencies may exercise in the orbit of Order (and Protection) through Authority—as an Order subsidiary and supplementary to the Order (and Protection) through Consent.