Governments and lobbies still need to fight to end modern-day slavery
A WEEK before the much-heralded publication of a global slavery index, the authorities in Mauritania, which once again tops the rankings, arrested the country’s most prominent abolitionist. Biram Dah Abeid (pictured), a self-proclaimed descendant of slaves who was runner-up in Mauritania’s presidential election in June, albeit with only 9% of votes to the incumbent’s 82%, was detained along with a clutch of fellow members of his Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement.
On paper, Mauritania abolished slavery in 1981, though without passing legislation to punish slave-owners. In 2007 it made slave-owners liable to prosecution. But Mr Abeid, who says that half of Mauritania’s population are descendants of slaves (or are still slaves), insists that the law continues to be flouted. Amnesty International, among other advocacy groups, has protested against his recent arrest. The Walk Free Foundation, an Australia-based lobby that published its latest global slavery index on November 18th, reckons that around 150,000 people out of Mauritania’s total population of 3.8m are still enslaved.
Measuring the number of slaves as a proportion of a country’s population, the index reckons that Uzbekistan, Haiti, Qatar and India are the worst offenders, after Mauritania. In absolute terms, India comes top, with more than 14m people reckoned to be equivalent to slaves, followed by China, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. Definitions of modern-day slavery are necessarily elastic, encompassing bonded labour, human trafficking, forced or servile marriage, women coerced into prostitution and, in many cases, arduous and ill-paid menial work in countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, where expatriate workers contracted through agencies in various parts of Asia have minimal rights and cannot leave of their own free will, because their passports are routinely confiscated on arrival.
The index’s methodology, which draws on random samples in a score of countries and is necessarily speculative because slavery in its various forms is generally illegal and hidden, has been severely queried. What is plain, however, is that modern-day slavery persists widely. Fortunately there is some evidence that the airing of it nudges governments, such as those of Qatar and India, to respond to the bad publicity by taking some remedial legislative action. As for Mr Abeid, he remains in custody in Mauritania, which seemingly prefers to crack down on anti-slavery activists, rather than slavery itself.
