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Slavery – down but not yet out

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was successful in his campaign to abolish the slave trade within the British Empire in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833, but, strange to tell, that did not make slavery illegal in Great Britain itself.

<a href="http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Slavery_in_the_United_States" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source</a>

Slavery has finally been made illegal

The “Somerset Case” of 1772 effectively ended slavery in Britain in practical terms, because Lord Mansfield ruled in a civil case that a slave could not be bought or sold; in other words slavery was not a condition that could be subject to an enforceable contract. A slave could therefore seek his or her freedom in the courts and their owner would not have a defence in contract law.

However, that did not make the institution of slavery illegal because it had not been so declared by Parliament. That did not happen until 2010, with the Coroners and Justice Act (Section 71) that made it a criminal offence to hold a person in “slavery or servitude”. The punishment for so doing was set at up to 14 years’ imprisonment.

This may sound like a pure technicality, especially as there have long been laws in Great Britain covering such matters as false imprisonment and forced labour, but slave masters have been active in the black economy for many years and the lack of a specific law aimed at them had made it difficult to secure prosecutions. Fortunately, that is no longer the case.

It may be hard to believe, but there are still people around who seek to enslave others in this country. A recent case involved a traveller family who picked up “down and outs” and forced them to work for the family business for food and nothing else. Although the laws against false imprisonment and forced labour would have applied in this case, the specific recognition that this constituted slavery was important because it “called a spade a spade” and enabled the proper punishment to be applied.

Slavery is still a real problem in many places

Unfortunately, slavery is still endemic in many countries in the world. It has been estimated that there are more than 27 million slaves in the world today, which is more than were seized from Africa during the 400 years of the slave trade.

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Written by Indexer

17 Comments

  1. Call a “spade a spade” indeed. Any person being forced to do something against their will know that they are not being treated like a human being with human rights. Any person doing that to another human being knows that if they were the one being forced against their will they wouldn’t like it! Neither person NEEDS a written law to make the matter of OPPRESSION or ENSLAVEMENT plain to see or less obscure. However, one does need a law if one doesn’t want to go to prison for doing something that’s ILLEGAL. That’s how all these lines get drawn and crisscrossed and chicken scratched on paper in a court room somewhere. That’s why slaves rebel! They don’t need a judge or a master to tell them they were born free!

  2. I feel that this issue is very important and must be ended as soon as possible. There is no moral reason that a person should have to work and not be paid or have basic human dignity.

  3. Sadly, slavery is still in existence in the USA. There have been cases in which people have purchased a child from Haiti similar place and forced to do menial chores. While they are better cared for than the slaves of the 19th century, it is both revolting and illegal.

    There is also a lot of sex slavery in America. Young runaway kids are grabbed and forced to work in the sex industry: pornography and prostitution. Many of them are kept on various drugs to make them dependent on the people controlling them so that they can’t run. There is a Christian ministry called Exodus Cry which does a lot of work with people caught up in this.

    • Unfortunately this is a universal problem, made worse by the current trend of mass emigration from third world countries to the richer countries of the west.