Slave Owners Sentenced to Prison

On March 28th 2018, the special slavery court  Nouadhibou, Mauritania sentenced father and son slave owners to 20 years in prison. In the same case, a woman slave owner received a 10 year year sentence. The men, Saleck Ould Amar and his son Hamoudi Ould Saleck, must also pay a fine of 500.000 MRU. Ravea Mint Mohamed must pay 250.000 MRU in amends. Reportedly Mint Mohamed is in custody but the men have gone into hiding, thus escaping imprisonment.

These criminal penalties for slave owning are the harshest sentences ever pronounced in Mauritania. Typically slave owners escape punishment. Instead the police and local authorities prefer to imprison the anti-slavery protestors.

Mauritania criminalised slavery in 2007 and enacted a law in 2015 that names slavery as a crime against humanity. Nonetheless successful prosecutions are extremely rare. This trial is only the second  successful prosecution for slave owning. In the previous successful prosecution, however, the slave owners received very light sentences of only two to five years in prison. In that case, two women in their 30s had both been subject to slavery their entire lives. Such lenient sentences do not comply with the 2015 anti-slavery statute.

“This is a big victory,” Jakub Sobik of Anti-Slavery International told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “The sentences are quite high and in line with the law, which is by no means a given.”

The former slaves were aided in this prosecution by SOS-Esclaves and Anti-Slavery International.  Slave owning cases typically languish for years and years in the courts, because of a reluctance to prosecute. The March 28th sentencing is the product of a  a seven-year fight, said Salimata Lam of Mauritanian group SOS Esclaves.

See report in French on CRIDEM