3071-The political economy of new slavery

Geraldine Van Bueren 239
be a claim by the descendants and therefore beyond the Austrian crimes
against humanity precedent.
The new Statute of the International Criminal Court also includes
enslavement and deportation as crimes against humanity but again the
court’s jurisdiction will not be retrospective. 7
Finally, there have been a number of acknowledgements of gross
violations of human rights in previous centuries and reparation payments
made to indigenous peoples. The Waikatu Raupatu Claims Settlement
Act l995, for example, under which the New Zealand government paid
substantial compensation for seizure of Maori lands by British settlers,
arose, arguably, because of the breach of an earlier l840 treaty. The same
is true of many other indigenous settlements. However, these could not
be a legal precedent for reparations for slavery and the slave trade, since
these were not illegal under existing international law at the time.
In conclusion, there are no obvious legal precedents for the reparations
claim to be based on. Therefore, rather than relying upon Nuremberg or
the Genocide Convention alternative approaches need to be found.
A new approach to legal precedents: piracy and the
slave trade
It is wrongly assumed that at the time of the African slave trade there
were no international laws of which the slave traders were in violation.
The new approach developed in this chapter is to argue that there is
sufficient precedent but it is found elsewhere and not in the Nuremberg
trials or the Genocide Convention. Based upon this, there is sufficient
precedent for a new charter to be negotiated to provide a framework for
reparations for the slave trade. This approach bases itself on the underlying
principle of international human rights law: that it is dynamic
and purposive in the direction of greater protection of human rights.
For the sake of international legal precision it is necessary to distinguish
between slavery and the slave trade. In the first Treaty of
Paris, signed on 30 May l814 between France and the United Kingdom,
it was agreed to suppress the traffic in slaves although the nature
of the co-operation was unspecified and the slave trade could continue
for five years (Thomas, 1997, p. 583). The condemnation was
reiterated at the Congress of Vienna in l815. Between 1815 and 1880
over 50 bilateral treaties were concluded (Robertson and Merrills,
1992, p. 14). The General Act of the Berlin Conference l885, signed by
15 powers, declared that ‘trading in slaves is forbidden in conformity
with the principles of international law’. This implies that the slave