ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on recaptives’ testimony and the preoccupation of Mixed Commissions with intervention, also serves as an introduction to the operation of Mixed Commissions. It presents the role of recaptives’ testimony and begins by briefly outlining the salient legal institutional features of Mixed Commissions, pointing to the significant advantages British Commissioners enjoyed within the system. These benefits buttressed Commissioners’ ability to expand the circumstances in which slave ships could be detained. However, as the next section shows, whilst the expansion of rights to intervene would have benefited some recaptives, recaptives themselves enjoyed no procedural rights before Mixed Commissions. Despite this, recaptive evidence was called upon. The chapter discusses the legal preoccupation of Mixed Commissions with questions of intervention. It focuses on one question that persistently faced Commissioners which was how to adjudicate apparently unlawfully captured slave ships. Mixed Commissions were established to adjudicate the lawfulness of the capture of slave ships.
