Pace Schwarz

Aug 21, 2024 | justsecurity.org | Janet Lord |Pace Schwarz |Matthew Smith |Michael Stein |Alex Green |Rosemary Kayess

Although the prohibition of the slave trade is one of the oldest peremptory norms of international law, its absence from the Rome Statute – the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) – created a gap in international law that has yet to be filled. While the ICC’s framework accounts for the crime of enslavement, it neglects the legally distinct, but related, crime of the slave trade (i.e., criminalizing the intent to initiate or maintain a person’s enslavement).