McGeehan, Nicholas --- "Exploitation Rebranded: How International Law Sold Slavery as Forced Labour" [2012] ELECD 795; in Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne (eds), "The Challenge of Human Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: The Challenge of Human Rights

Editor(s): Keane, David; McDermott, Yvonne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857939005

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Exploitation Rebranded: How International Law Sold Slavery as Forced Labour

Author(s): McGeehan, Nicholas

Number of pages: 17

Extract:

11. Exploitation rebranded: How
international law sold slavery as
forced labour
Nicholas McGeehan

The prohibition of slavery was arguably the first human right which
prompted action from a global community of states. This paper posits
that the European colonial powers of the time were less concerned with
abolishing slavery than they were with maintaining and developing their
economic interests in Africa, a situation which led to a normative and
institutional fracturing of slavery, as first forced labour and then servi-
tude appeared in international law as practices related to, but somehow
distinct from, slavery. It furthermore considers that the failure of human
rights law to question the integrity of a framework it adopted, rather than
designed, is to a large extent responsible for slavery's marginalization in
the human rights discourse.
Part 1 addresses the human rights law framework on slavery, servitude
and forced labour and highlights the extent of the confusion over the
exact nature of those practices, with reference to recent case law from
the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (henceforth ECtHR and ICTY).
Part 2 examines the position that slavery relates exclusively to owner-
ship, a position which to a large extent justifies the separate existence of
forced labour and servitude. Part three explores the background to the
drafting of the international treaties which facilitated the separation of
slavery and forced labour. Essentially, this is a study of how personali-
ties and politics combined to shape the international ...