The Most Salient Legal Hurdle: Countering the Refusal to Legally Recognise Colonial Slavery as a Crime Against Humanity

In this article, a distinction is made between two approaches to the legal evaluation of colonial slavery. In the first one, the recognition of colonial slavery as a crime against humanity is limited to the ‘here and now’, muted and even deprived of its legal meaning. In the second approach, colonial slavery is seen as already violating important legal principles that were valid at the time. In this way, it opens the possibility to recognise colonial slavery as a legal crime. Accordingly, it is argued that only the second approach honours the personhood of the enslaved person, creates room for reparation and addresses a persistent contradiction within law itself.