Slavery

Slavery is a condition of control over a person, known as a slave, that can be enforced by violence or other forms of coercion against his or her will. Slavery almost always occurs for the purpose of securing the labor of the slave. A specific form, known as chattel slavery, is defined by the absolute legal ownership of a person or persons, including the legal right to buy and sell them.

Reparations

As noted above, there have been movements to achieve reparations for those held in involuntary servitude, or sometimes their descendants. There is a growing modern movement to donate funds achieved in reparations efforts not to the descendants of those held as slaves in prior generations, but instead to donate them to those freed from slavery in this generation, in other countries and circumstances.

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In general, reparation for being held in slavery is handled as a civil law matter in almost every country. This is often decried as a serious problem, since slaves are exactly those people who have no access to the legal process. Systems of fines and reparations paid from fines collected by authorities, rather than in civil courts, have been proposed to alleviate this in some nations.

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In the United States, the reparations movement often cites the 40 acres and a mule decree. Recent effort have also targeted businesses that profited from the slave trade and issuing insurance on slaves.

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In Africa, the 2nd World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission was convened in Ghana in 2000. Its deliberations concluded with a Petition being served in the International Court at the Hague for US$777 trillion against the United States, Canada, and European Union members for "unlawful removal and destruction of Petitioners' mineral and human resources from the African continent" between 1503 up to the end of the colonialism era in the late 1950s and 1960s. This was the first time a price had been put on African Reparations. http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eej2b/Soc410/barton.html

Related Topics:
1503 - 1950s - 1960s

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