3071-The political economy of new slavery

Geraldine Van Bueren 237
human rights behind the wall of a nation’s borders remained principally
that state’s exclusive concern:
States were obliged to abstain from interfering in the internal affairs
of one another. International law was not concerned with the way in
which a state treated its own nationals in its own territory. It is a
cliché of modern international law that the classical theory no longer
prevails in its unadulterated form.
Millett, 1999
We forget how new it was to place the individual at the centre of a
system prior to the development of international human rights law and
the extent of the resistance to this. When the Nuremberg Tribunal was
held it was criticized by many, including international lawyers. However,
‘whatever the state of the law in l945, Article 6 of the Nuremberg
Charter has since come to represent general international law’ (Brownlie,
1990, p. 562). In other words, what was once considered an innovative
mechanism issuing groundbreaking jurisprudence is now widely
deemed acceptable. The Nuremberg Tribunal provides a lesson but it is
not a parallel. The lesson is that reparations and accountability can be
reconceptualized within a larger global justice framework and justice
can still be attained. This is a call for an international charter to create
a duty for governments, corporations and certain families or individuals
to pay reparations for the slave trade.
Unreliable legal precedents
The most common legal examples cited in support of a claim for reparations
for slavery do not suffice as legal precedents. The cases frequently
cited are the judgement of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the subsequent
reparations for the Holocaust and the United Nations Genocide Convention
of l948 and the damages paid to indigenous peoples, including
Maori, for violations by non-indigenous settlers. Admittedly it is true
that there are many similarities between slavery in Africa and Latin
America and the German slavery and attempted extermination of the
Jews. The dominant regimes characterized both groups as racially inferior.
It is also true that both the Holocaust and the slave trade transported
people in degrading and inhuman conditions across geographic borders:
Jews were transported across Europe and the slave traders transported
people out of Africa. However, on closer examination there are important
legal differences between these claims and the claim for reparations for
the slave trade.