ABSTRACT
The history of human rights has traditionally been told as a moral success story, involving an inexorable march of humanity from savagery to civilisation. The prohibition of slavery and slave trade is most certainly a part of customary international law. The African Charter of Human and People’s Rights is silent on the issue of forced labour or convict labour. The antebellum slavery has cast a long shadow on the African-American experience of the criminal law. Historians have called the eighteenth-century anti-slavery campaign the ‘greatest of all human rights movements’ and ‘the most successful episode ever in the history of international human rights law’. The exclusion of convict labour from the legal prohibition of forced labour and ‘servitude’ has a long pedigree, dating back to the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The continued permissibility of the use of convict labour for public works was crucial for the construction of irrigation canals, bridges, roads, military barracks, and other colonial projects.
