3071-The political economy of new slavery

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Slavery as Piracy: The Legal Case
for Reparations for the Slave Trade 1
Geraldine Van Bueren
The need for a bold, just and consistent approach
The purpose of any type of reparations for past wrongs, is the restoration
of dignity: the dignity of survivors, the dignity of the memory of the
dead and the dignity achieved by making restitution for past wrongs.
The very act of reparation is to acknowledge respect. Reparations for consistent
patterns of historic abuses, including slavery, should be discussed
with this ethos and the building of a global community framework
in mind. Respect is the spirit in which the question whether present
generations should pay for the crimes of their ancestors and others to
whom they are unrelated, should be answered.
The process of reparations, of uncovering the evidence and exploring
causation, could also assist in the prevention of repetition of the harm
done. For example, it is hard to imagine that the contemporary trafficking
of human beings would have been ignored for so long by the
international community or would have been able to flourish in a global
community that had accepted full responsibility for the historical slave
trade. In this chapter the argument for reparations is therefore made
in the context of aiming for the complete elimination of contemporary
forms of slavery, including trafficking in human beings. In order to make
an argument for reparations, this chapter will focus on establishing
the legal grounds for such a claim. A state commits an internationally
wrongful act when it is in violation of an applicable rule of international
law whether treaty or customary law. Most of the international
laws cited in support of a slavery reparations claim are twentiethcentury
developments drafted and adopted after the cessation of the
majority of slavery. It is difficult, therefore, to argue that they should be
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