Everyone knows that slavery, in one of its forms, has been legal in many areas of the world, including the United States. Charitable organizations are very anxious to tell me about instances of modern slavery in many countries, but these seem to be mostly or exclusively cases where slavery itself is illegal in the jurisdiction, but slave masters nonetheless get away with holding people prisoner and extracting labor through force. In some third-world countries, it may be technically illegal but widely practiced and tolerated by police, etc. as long as it remains in keeping with societal values. For example, a place where slavery is technically illegal under applicable statutes or constitutional provisions but police will often look the other way when an employer imprisons their employees and refuses to pay them as long as the employer is considered an upstanding citizen and pays an appropriate bribe is not a location where slavery is truly legal.
Is slavery, in any form, actually legal in any jurisdiction? For example, are there any countries that have an official census of people that are legally considered slaves?
E.g.:
Cop: “Papers, please”
Person: <shows ID>
Cop: “Your slave status restricts you from traveling more than 50 miles from your residence without a pass from your current master. Do you have it? Let me radio HQ so we can consult the official Slave Registry to look up your current legal master.”
Involuntary servitude as a direct part of a criminal sentence (which is permitted in the US and most likely many other places) is not in scope. Please be rational and use a common-sense definition of slavery for this question.
Supposedly the UN Declaration of Human Rights banned slavery worldwide in 1948, but it appears it was never actually signed by all countries (not sure about that).
In 1981, Mauritania became the last country in the world to abolish slavery.
So it appears if it is legal somewhere, they aren’t admitting it.
Well you’ll probably discount it but “Kwalliso”, the North Korean political forced labour system seems to qualify to me because not only does the offender get taken into custody but so does three generations of their immediate family.
Ok the “owner” is the government but apart from that it seems to fit the definition since people who are entirely blameless except for being related to someone can end up in forced labour.
This would be the last place where slavery was officially legal. That said, Mauritania made it quite clear that they were bowing to international pressure to sign the law and didn’t really intend to actually change anything. In 2007 they made a somewhat less half-hearted attempt to abolish slavery, but once again the effort lacked oomph. About 20% of the current population are considered slaves. That said, slavery in the Sahel is somewhere between the chattel slavery that we understand, and a fairly rigid caste system.
I think this question is complicated by the fact that in most areas where slavery still happens, the “official” government is not actually in control. For example, it’s well known that the traditional leader of Rey Bouba, in Cameroon, holds slaves. But the Cameroonian state is weak enough in that area, and his private security forces are strong enough, that nobody would really be able to stop the situation.
This is the problem. What is “slavery”? A bonded servant, unpaid servant, feudal systems? “I owe my soul to the company store”? I suspect there are a lot of places in the world where a person has no choice but to stay doing the work they are doing essentially for the benefit of someone else - with basically a subsistence living to show for it. Whether it’s formal “ownership”, or a debt they cannot hope to repay, or simply they have nowhere else to go in their society and would starve - it’s still basically slavery.