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UN Ignores Modern-Day Slavery
(National Post-Canada) Tom Gross - The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) begins its annual session in Geneva Friday with Mauritania as its vice-president for the next year, a country that allows 20% of its citizens, about 800,000 people, to live as slaves. Nowhere is slavery still so systematically practiced as in Mauritania, an Islamic republic where imams often use their interpretations of Sharia law to justify forcing the darker-skinned black African Haratine minority to serve as slaves to the Arabic Moor population. "Officially, the Mauritanian authorities have abolished slavery on five separate occasions. But in reality, it exists exactly as before," Abidine Merzough, the European coordinator for the anti-slavery NGO Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania, told the fifth annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy last week.