Introduction
Mauritania has some of the strongest anti-slavery laws in West Africa. The country banned slavery by decree in 1981, and criminalised it in 2007, and later in 2012 slavery was added to Mauritania’s Constitution as a crime against humanity. In 2015, it passed a new law with prison terms of up to 20 years for slavery (Antislavery in Domestic Legislation, n.d.). However, while on paper the legislation is impeccable, the reality is very different. Thousands of people are still born into slavery today in Mauritania, inheriting the status of their mothers, and serving the same families their parents once served (Obokata, 2023). While it would be easy to assume this problem is already solved because the laws exist, the real danger is that the laws become a shield. They let the state look accountable, while the daily lives of people still in slavery barely change. Real abuse now hides in the gap between the law and daily life, and it falls almost entirely on one group, namely the Haratin, which represents of the largest communities in the country.
The objective of this article is to look closely at this gap and understand why slavery is still widely present in the country. Mauritania’s anti-slavery laws exist mostly on paper, and courts rarely convict slaveholders; and when they do, the sentences are far too short. At the same time, people who speak out against slavery are arrested more often than the people who keep slaves (Amnesty International, 2018). And behind both failures sits a deeper problem of discrimination that keeps the Haratin poor, dependent, and shut out of public life. The article first explains who the Haratin are and what their slavery looks like on a daily basis. It then sets out the laws the country has passed. Following this section, the article investigates the persistent failure of courts, how the state treats abolitionists, and what international law demands. Lastly, it concludes highlighting the needed change.
Who Are the Haratin?
The Haratin are Arabic-speaking Mauritanians whose ancestors were captured and enslaved by the Beydane, an Arab-Berber group often called the White Moors. Slavery, and therefore slave status, passes down through the mother, so a child born to an enslaved woman is treated as the property of her mother’s owner from the day of birth. The Haratin make up about 40 percent of the population, accounting as one of the largest groups in the country (Minority Rights Group International, n.d.).
Significantly, the Haratin are not part of other communities of other Black Mauritanians, such as the Halpulaar, Soninké, and Wolof. While those groups face racism too, they were never enslaved by the Beydane, being allowed, for instance, to keep their own languages.
Nobody knows exactly how many people are still enslaved. The Walk Free Global Slavery Index 2023 puts the number at around 149,000, one of the highest rates in the world (Walk Free, 2023). Human rights groups working on the ground are more cautious, and both Anti-Slavery International and Minority Rights Group International say the number is in the tens of thousands, highlighting that no proper national survey has ever been done (Minority Rights Group International et al., 2018). Tomoya Obokata, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, visited the country in 2022, and reached a similar conclusion, noting that estimates range from hundreds of thousands at one end down to claims that slavery barely exists at all (Obokata, 2023). Part of the reason the figures are so unclear is the census, which records neither ethnicity nor slave status. Therefore, the state holds no real data on the very problem it says it is fixing.
Slavery in Mauritania rarely looks like chains and auctions. Most enslaved people work inside their owners’ homes, where they herd animals, fetch water, cook, and raise children, usually for no pay and with no freedom to leave. Many have never known about any other life. In his country visit report, Obokata has described women in slavery suffering sexual violence, and reported their children being treated as the master’s property (Obokata, 2023). Religion is sometimes used to preserve existing power structures. Survivors have disclosed that they had been taught that paradise lies under their master’s foot (Obokata, 2023). When obedience is sold as the path to heaven, leaving feels like a sin rather than freedom, evidencing why this kind of slavery is so hard to break.
Strong Laws, Weak Enforcement
Mauritania has introduced various legislations abolishing slavery several times over the past century, yet each ban has fallen short. France first outlawed it in 1905 during colonial rule, and the constitutions that came after independence treated all citizens as free. The clearest step came on November 9th, 1981, when a presidential decree abolished slavery across the country, nevertheless without carrying punishment for those who continued to keep slaves. Therefore, for more than 20 years, the ban changed almost nothing (Freedom House, 2015).
That changed in 2007 when Law No. 2007-048 was passed on September 3rd and made slavery a crime in Mauritania for the first time. Setting prison terms of five to ten years (Antislavery in Domestic Legislation, n.d.), the law was barely used, and the only conviction under it came in 2011 when a man was found guilty of enslaving two brothers, Said and Yarg Salem. He was sentenced to two years in prison, which was below the legal minimum, and he was then released on bail after only a few months (Anti-Slavery International, 2016).
In 2012, the country amended its Constitution, enlisting slavery as a crime against humanity. The biggest law came three years later, Law No. 2015-031, passed on September 10th, 2015, which doubled the maximum sentence of 10 years to 20 years. It also broadened the meaning of slavery to include forced marriage, debt bondage, and serfdom (Antislavery in Domestic Legislation, n.d.). It equally made it a crime for a police officer to refuse to investigate a slavery complaint, and it also let approved human rights groups to advocate for cases for victims who could not act for themselves. Further, this law set up three special anti-slavery courts, located in Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, and Néma.
When the law was passed, the UN welcomed it, warning that the words would mean nothing without action. Urmila Bhoola, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery at the time, said that strong enforcement, not just a strong law, was what mattered (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 2015).
Her warning proved right. Mauritania went on to build an even bigger legal toolbox. In 2020, it passed a law on human trafficking that rightly treats inherited slavery as a form of trafficking, and in 2024, it merged the three special courts into a single national court (United States Department of State, 2025). So, while the laws kept improving on paper, enforcement did not, as convictions never followed.
Special Courts, Few Convictions
The special anti-slavery courts are the strongest part of the law while also being the place where the system fails most clearly. In their first full year, the three courts received 47 cases, where they convicted only two slaveholders with five-year sentences, but four of those years were suspended. So, each man served just one year (United States Department of State, 2017). Consequently, a law providing penalties of up to 20 years’ imprisonment resulted, in practice, in sentences of only 12 months.
The years that followed showed no improvement. At the time of Obokata’s country visit in 2022, the Ministry of Justice reported only 38 slavery cases before the special courts, whose sentences usually ran from six months to two years, far below the ten to 20 years the law demands (Obokata, 2023). The United States Department of State went further in its 2022 report: the Government of Mauritania had not convicted a single slaveholder that year, and courts had dropped or downgraded every case left over from the year before (United States Department of State, 2022).
So, why does a strong law give such weak results? The UN report points to a few reasons which mutually reinforce each other. The first is reclassification: when a victim reports on slavery, officials often log it as a relatively smaller labour problem, such as unpaid wages, or child employment, that carries only lighter penalties (Obokata, 2023). The second reason is informal settlement: many disputes are smoothed over by tribal and community leaders, away from courts (Obokata, 2023). The third reason is pressure: slaveholders’ families push police and judges to drop cases or look away (Obokata, 2023).
Another significant weakness in the implementation of the 2015 anti-slavery law concerns accountability for public officials. Officers who refuse to investigate slavery can be put on trial. The UN has however reported that this penalty has never once been applied (Obokata, 2023). The state has also pulled back from helping victims. An agency called Tadamoun was set up in 2013 to deal with the effects of slavery. In 2020, it was replaced by a new body, Taazour, where any mention of slavery victims was removed. The Taazour managers told the UN expert that helping certain groups would be divisive. They said ethnicity had nothing to do with fighting poverty (Obokata, 2023). The latest United States report kept Mauritania on its second tier, meaning that the country still falls short of the basic standards for fighting slavery and trafficking, even though the government is taking some steps (United States Department of State, 2025).
Jailing the Abolitionists, not the Slaveholders
Slaveholders rarely go to prison while the people who fight slavery often do. The best-known anti-slavery group in the country is the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA-Mauritania), founded by activist Biram Dah Abeid in 2008. The group has tried to register as a legal body since 2011 but has been turned down multiple times, continously working under the risk of arrest.
Amnesty International recorded 168 arrests of human rights defenders in Mauritania between 2014 and early 2018. At least 63 of them were IRA members, and 17 people allegedly reported instances of torture and ill-treatment while in custody (Amnesty International, 2018). When contrasted with the fact that only two slaveholders were convicted during the first year of the specialised courts’ operation, this disparity becomes particularly striking. The available data suggests that the state has punished people for fighting slavery far more often than it has punished people for perpetuating it.
Biram Dah Abeid, who has won the UN Human Rights Prize in 2013, has been jailed several times; he spent much of 2014 to 2016 in prison for protesting against the freedom slaveholders enjoy, and he was arrested again in August 2018 and held until January 2019. While he was still in his cell, the voters of his district elected him to Parliament (Front Line Defenders, n.d.). He has run for president twice and came second both times. In the June 2024 election, he took just over 22 percent of the vote (International Foundation for Electoral Systems [IFES], 2024).
The pressure has not stopped under the current president, Mohamed Ould Cheikh El-Ghazouani. The activist Ahmed Ould Samba lost his government job in October 2024 and was arrested a day later, after posting a social media post about racial bias in public hiring. He was held for a month, then freed. He was then arrested again in January 2025 and sentenced to a year in prison in May 2025 (Media Foundation for West Africa [MFWA], 2025). Around the same time, IRA-Mauritania protesters were beaten and detained. One of them was an elected Member of Parliament (Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization [UNPO], 2025). These are recent stories happening under a government that tells the world it has moved on from slavery.
International Law Requirements
Ending physical bondage is only the start: Haratin no longer owned by anyone often remain poor and dependent. Land is one clear example, where the majority of Haratin farmland belongs to their former masters, as the right to use this land is often taken away once a person is freed (Obokata, 2023). Official papers are another barrier. A change to the birth registration rules in 2010 made it much harder to register late births, leaving many Haratin children without documents needed for school, voting, and public services (MENA Rights Group, 2021).
This kind of exclusion is exactly what international law tells Mauritania to fix. The country signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 2004. Article 8 of the ICCPR bans slavery and servitude completely, with no exceptions, even in an emergency. Mauritania is also bound by the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). Under the Treaty, the expert committee has said that discrimination based on descent is banned, including caste-like systems of inherited status, such as the Haratin (Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination [CERD], 2002). The country has also accepted the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which protects the right to education, work, and a decent standard of living, rights the Haratin are often denied.
The duty exists at the regional level too. The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights bans slavery and exploitation in Article 5. Mauritania accepted it in 1986. When the case of the two enslaved brothers, Said and Yarg Salem, was brought before the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, it was ruled in 2018 that Mauritania had failed to protect the boys. It said the country had let impunity take hold (Anti-Slavery International, 2018).
A separate ruling supports this view. In the 2008 case of Hadijatou Mani against neighbouring Niger, the court found that a West African state can be held responsible when it does nothing to stop slavery on its land, an opinion supported by the UN. When they review Mauritania, they raise serious worries about slavery. They also note how few Haratin and Black Mauritanians hold posts in government, the army, and the courts (Minority Rights Group International, 2019). While Mauritania has promised repeatedly to end slavery and the forms of discrimination behind it, these promises are binding in law, reflecting a sheer failure of will as opposed to legislative incapacity.
Conclusion and the Way Forward
Mauritania has banned slavery, criminalising such acts, enshrined it in the Constitution, and built the adequate courts to deal with it. Yet, people are still born into slavery and grow old in it. Slaveholders walk free while the activists who name them go to prison. This is what impunity looks like when it wears the clothes of reform.
Closing the gap does not need new laws: it needs Mauritania to uphold what it has already written and introduced. The first and most urgent step is effective enforcement. Every report of slavery should reach the special court within a set time. Any choice to downgrade a case to a small labour offence should be put in writing and open to challenge. Sentences should be prescribed by law and not fall to a few months. Just as important, the rule that punishes officers for refusing to investigate should be implemented as intended.
The government must also cease treating campaigners as a threat. Granting IRA-Mauritania legal recognition would carry no material cost, yet it would signal a genuine commitment on the part of the state. Freeing activists held for speaking out would have the same effect. So would ending the wave of arrests that caught people like Ahmed Ould Samba in 2025. A country that jails its abolitionists cannot claim to be fighting slavery.
There is deeper work beyond the courtroom. Mauritania has to break the systemic dependence that ties Haratin families to their former masters. This means ensuring that freed families are granted real rights to the land they farm, so that their freedom does not lead to hunger. It means reopening birth registration, so Haratin children can obtain the papers they need for school and work. And it means counting the problem honestly, by recording ethnicity and slave descent in the national census. A state cannot fix what it refuses to measure.
Other countries and bodies have a role too. The African Commission and the African Union should push Mauritania to act on the rulings already made against it. The UN Human Rights Council should keep slavery on the agenda when it reviews Mauritania in 2026. It should not let polite recommendations be noted and then forgotten. Trade and aid partners should tie their support to clear, public results. That means a real rise in convictions and the registration of independent anti-slavery groups. Mauritania has the laws it needs already in place. What it lacks is the will to use them against powerful people, and the patience to stand with those fighting on the ground. Until changes are implemented, abolition will stay a promise on paper, and impunity will stay the reality in people’s lives.
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