New (to us) international tribunal finds Niger liable for failure to protect from slavery

Just when we thought we knew the gamut of new international and internationalized courts and tribunals, along comes this news:
On Monday Niger was found liable for having failed to prevent enslavement, and thus was ordered to pay € 15,000 ($19,000), plus costs and interest, to its enslaved national, Hadijatou Mani (above).
A dozen years ago, at the age of 12, Mani was sold for $500, Le Monde reports, "to a master who exploited her not only as a domestic and agricultural servant, but also as a wahiya, a sexual slave." This "master" was a friend of someone who "years earlier, had reduced Mani's mother into slavery." Eventually Mani "desired to marry someone else," and sought recourse in Niger's courts. For her trouble, she was convicted of bigamy under local customary law, and put in prison. (credit for Agence France-Presse photo by Boureima Hama)
Aided by the NGOs Anti-Slavery International, Interights, and Timidria, Mani sought recourse in an international tribunal: the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, established 17 years ago as part of the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS), a 23-year-old regional international organization comprising the 15 member states of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo -- and, of course, Niger. (map credit)
Decisions of the 7-member Court are binding and nonappealable. The Court has jurisdiction to hear allegations that a state has violated a right articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 4 of that 1948 instrument states:

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

Monday's decision marked the 1st time that Niger's been found liable for failing to protect a citizen from slavery -- notwithstanding the NGO estimate that as many as 43,000 of Niger's 12,000,000 people are slaves.
Anti-Slavery International's Romana Cacchioli said of the decision:

It demonstrates that a woman from the least favored class in society has rights.

To which Niger's representative replied:

We obey the law and will respect the decision.

Mani herself had this to say:

I am very happy with this decision. I feel that I am a human being like everyone else.

Corruption, Conflict and Oil

The United States has apparently agreed to assist Nigeria in criminalizing a practice known as “oil bunkering.” This assistance could create opportunities to interrupt the flow of funds that fuel rampant violence in the Niger Delta, where large amounts of oil are siphoned-off and sold illegally each day through well-established and corrupt channels. As part of this effort, Nigeria was recently charged with developing a chemical “tagging” mechanism which would identify oil sold by way of legitimate channels, such that all illicit oil – bunkered oil – would be readily identifiable (by the absence of the chemical tag) as having entered the commerce stream through illicit means. (credit for photo of Nigerian oil pipes; map credit)

While the prospects for such a tagging mechanism may seem extremely expensive and perhaps even far flung, the high costs resulting from current oil bunkering, corruption and violence funded by blood-oil, make even the high cost of developing such a chemical tag potentially very attractive. More to the point, oil companies already have tagging mechanisms that they use for other purposes. Also, the relative success of a similar tagging mechanism for blood diamonds, which formed part of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, provides ample optimism for the possibility of stemming the flow of blood oil.

Nigeria may thus serve as a test case for addressing the close ties between oil, corruption and conflict prevalent in other areas as well.

(Cross-posted at The Conglomerate, the business/law/economics/society site where I am currently guest blogging. And see IntLawGrrls' look back at oil history below.)

On this day

On April 9, ...

... 1999, "in an apparent coup attempt" Ibrahim Bare Mainassara, Niger's President, was shot dead at the airport in Niamey, apparently while trying to flee the country. Days later a military junta seized control; it ruled until elections were held, following a grant of amnesty, at the end of the year.

... 1865, America's Civil War ended when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the courthouse at Appamattox, Virginia. (image credit)