Dakar, Senegal
Thomson Reuters Foundation
Mauritania is backsliding in efforts to eliminate descent-based slavery, an activist and opposition member has warned, as the West African country joined the UN Human Rights Council for the first time this week.
Biram Dah Abeid called on other UN members to pressure Mauritania, the last country in the world to abolish slavery, to end the practice as it joined the body responsible for promoting and protecting human rights around the world.
“I think this is a denial of the very principles on which the United Nations is based,” said Abeid, who has twice run for president and leads the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), a Mauritanian anti-slavery group.
“We will fight so that the Human Rights Council is really a human rights council, not one infiltrated by states that flout human rights,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Biram Dah Abeid speaks at the 12th Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in Geneva, Switzerland, on 18th February. PICTURE: Handout/ UN Watch via Thomson Reuters Foundation
A coalition of international human rights groups also protested Mauritania’s election last year to the 47-nation council, whose 2020 session opened in Geneva on Monday, citing its failure to protect human rights at home.
Five other states including Libya and Venezuela were also elected despite activists’ protests that they had poor records.
POLICE IN NIGER RESCUE 232 VICTIMS OF SEX TRAFFICKING, FORCED LABOUR
Police in Niger have rescued 232 victims of sex trafficking and forced labour, including girls as young as 10, in a major operation in the capital Niamey, Interpol said on Wednesday.
“Operation Sarraounia” involved more than 100 police officers who conducted a series of raids over 10 days in late January, said the global police organisation, which provided assistance.
The victims included 46 children, mostly locals forced into sex work in hostels and slums, and 180 Ghanaian men who were promised jobs online and then enslaved for forced labour.
Police also arrested 18 suspected traffickers.
Niger is a source, destination and transit country for human trafficking, with thousands of migrants passing through each year en route to North Africa and Western Europe.
The country cracked down on migration in 2016 under pressure from the European Union, but experts say this increased the risk of exploitation for migrants by forcing them to move in secret.
“It’s bad enough when you have transportation of illicit goods, but these are real people with real ambitions,” said Stephen Kavanagh, Interpol’s executive director of police services.
“We have to remember the families that they thought they were going to support by finding employment – and then suddenly they were enslaved,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The men from Ghana had been recruited online with the promise of “decent work”, said Interpol, but when they arrived in Niger they were locked up and their documents confiscated.
The children were mostly from Niger. In addition to those used for sex work, others were taken from their families and forced to beg at markets and bus stations.
Niger in 2019 increased trafficking convictions and trained more law enforcement officers than in previous years, earning it an upgrade on the Unites States’ closely watched Trafficking in Persons annual report.
But it still does not meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, said the US Government, calling on the state to increase victim services and access to justice.
“Operation Sarraounia has shed much light on several criminal groups and trafficking routes,” said Niger’s police chief Barka Dankassoua in a statement from Interpol.
“The skills our officers have learned will be put to good use as we follow up on a number of leads.”
– NELLIE PEYTON, Thomson Reuters Foundation
Mauritania’s government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. The government has previously denied slavery is widespread and said that like any crime, the government works hard to address any cases that come up.
Slavery is a historical practice in the Saharan country, which only abolished it in 1981.
Today, more than two in every 100 people – 90,000 in total – live as slaves, according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index.
The issue cuts along racial lines, with black Haratin people typically enslaved as cattle herders and domestic servants by the lighter-skinned elite, known as white Moors.
This month IRA reported that an eight-year-old boy who ran away and told police he was enslaved had been detained in the same cell as his alleged master for several days, pressured to change his story and then sent back home after a local court hearing.
A 14-year-old girl who filed a complaint in September was also sent back to her alleged master in a similar case, said Abeid.
“This is why we say that the current government has regressed in terms of slavery in the seven months since [President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani] has been in power,” he said.
“This doesn’t mean that things were good before him…but they didn’t return fleeing slaves to their masters.”
Ghazouani was the ruling party candidate elected in June, 2019, with 52 per cent of the vote. Abeid came in second with 18.58 per cent.
Other anti-slavery activists said it was too soon to say if the government was regressing, but that it had not made any progress, as evidenced by the most recent case.
“There has always been a reluctance from the government to prosecute slavery cases effectively…and I see this as a continuation of the same system,” said Sarah Mathewson, Africa programme manager for British charity Anti-Slavery International.
However, she added she was not aware of any previous examples of children being returned to their masters, and called on the government to investigate.
Another Mauritanian anti-slavery group, SOS Esclaves, said they were well aware of the risk and take it upon themselves to ensure victims’ security.
“If we only take the victim to the police…there is always a moment when the master or the master’s family can take them back,” said Salimata Lam, national coordinator of SOS Esclaves.
