Droit et Cultures (Nov 2015)
L’esclavage : de l’atteinte à la personne à la mise en jeu du système social
Abstract
While slave is the embodiment of the non-right, human societies never stop legislating about him. If from abolitions (with some cuts), a large number of juridical instruments, multilateral and bilateral, contain measures forbidding slavery in wartime as in peacetime and develop the prohibition to exercise on others a property right in reference to situations opposite to human dignity - raising a crime against humankind, Law did not stop trying to solve the contradictions which arose from its confrontation to the social system. There is a legal status of the slave defined by the prohibition which we try here to analyze through a critical approach of the Law: understood as a social relation, it is connected with power and conflicts but also with social values. On this basis, we would like to light the sense of the law regarding slavery, that is to say its meaning and the way in which it directs or can direct the society which contributed to create it.
