Article 4

Presented to you by: Aniello Giuseppe Di Cresce Mattia

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Slavery refers to a condition in which individuals are owned by others, who control where they live and at what they work. Slavery had previously existed throughout history, in many times and most places. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, Incas and Aztecs all had slaves. Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation.

Slavery was widely accepted in most of the ancient civilizations and it was regulated by laws. Among these ancient civilizations, the Roman one had represented the peak of the slave society, in which slaves labour was an essential factor for the economy. One of the most important achievements of Roman conquest wars was the take-over of new slaves.

Not unlike Rome, ancient Greece based its economical system on slavery. In fact in Athens for a long time there were more slaves than freemen. The great importance of this social phenomenon explains how it was possible to build architectural masterpieces in the antiquity.

During the Middle Ages a new social phenomenon arose: the serfdom. It was the main kind of forced labor at that age; however it wasnt a real form of slavery.

After the discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus in 1492, slavery entered every aspect of economical life. The TransAtlantic Slave Trade began around the midfifteenth century when Portuguese interests in Africa moved away from the fabled deposits of gold to a much more readily available commodity:slaves. By the seventeenth century the trade was in full swing, reaching a peak towards the end of the eighteenth century. It was a trade which was especially fruitful, since every stage of the journey could be profitable for merchants.

Expanding European empires in the New World lacked one major resource: a work force. In most cases the indigenous people had proved unreliable (most of them were dying from diseases brought over from Europe), and Europeans were unsuited to the climate and suffered under tropical diseases. Africans, on the other hand, were excellent workers: they often had experience of agriculture and keeping cattle, they were used to a tropical climate, resistant to tropical diseases, and they could work very hard on plantations or in mines.

All three stages of the Triangular Trade (named for the rough shape it makes on a map) were profitable for merchants.

The first stage of the Triangular Trade involved taking manufactured goods from Europe to Africa. These goods were exchanged for African slaves.

The third, and final, stage of the Triangular Trade involved the return to Europe with the produce from the slave-labor plantations.

The second stage of the Triangular Trade involved shipping the slaves to the Americas.

During the Age of Enlightenment people started to consider slaves as human beings. In fact, during this period, a new movement started to spread: the abolitionism. Abolitionists were all those who fought against the slave trade and, in general, against any kind of abuse towards human beings. It is thanks to this movement that slavery started to be banned in all the colonial countries.

The first country to ban the slave trade was England. In fact thanks to the Slave Trade Act, passed by the British Parliament on 25 March 1807, the slave trade became illegal throughout the British Empire. The Act imposed a fine of 100 for every slave found aboard a British ship. The act's intention was to entirely outlaw the slave trade

within the British Empire, but the lucrative trade continued through smuggling. Sometimes captains at risk of being caught by the Royal Navy would throw slaves into the sea to reduce their fines. Thanks to the Royal Navy approximately 1,600 slave ships were seized over the years and 150,000 Africans who were aboard were freed.

The American Civil War was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 between the United States and several Southern slave-states that had declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America. The war had its origin in the issue of slavery and, after four years of bloody combat, the Confederacy was defeated, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong!

Abraham Lincoln

After the atrocities committed by the Nazi Germany during WWII there was the need of specifying the rights of individuals in the United Nations Charter. Therefore in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written. Among the 30 articles of the declaration, the UN found necessary to forbid slavery thanks to the fourth article.

While slavery was the first human right issue to arouse worldwide attention and international concern, we must face the fact that the practice of slavery remains a persistent problem in many parts of the world. Usually, we think about slavery as something belonging to the past; we think about servants of the ancient Rome, about Africans working in cotton fields in the southern States of the USA. We dont imagine that even today, in the 21 st century, men, women and children live just like slaves. Yet it is so, in fact there are millions of slaves all over the world.

Child labour and the use of children in armed conflicts are probably the worst examples of slavery today.

The new slavery can be fought thanks to the law enforcement agency, founding new organizations against human trafficking or simply passing new juridical rules. Besides, slavery has to be fought spreading as much as possible education in underdeveloped areas and supporting under the psychological and the economical aspects the victims of the abuses. But, above all, slavery must be vanquished defeating the general disregard towards the misery of millions of people still hit by the most unbearable kinds of violences.