The Slave Trade and The Origins of International Human Rights Law

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Description
Most people think that international human rights law was a product of World War IIs aftermath. But as Jenny S.Martinez shows, the use of international law to ban the international slave trade. Abolitionists in Britain, spurred by both Enlightenment conceptions of natural rights and by religious beliefs, pushed their government to make supressing the slave trade a focus of diplomavy and treaty-making. The result was a novel network of international treaties which created the world's  first international human rights courts-admiralty tribunals that were empowered to confiscate ships engaged in the illegal slave trade and liberate Africans found onboard. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, heared more than 600 cases and helped free at least 80,000 Africans between 1807 and 1871. Buried in the archives of the slave trade courts, ships' logs, and the British foreign office are not only dramatic stories of capture and redemption, but also the foundations of contemporary human human rights law. International and domestic courts targeted states and non-state transactional actors on behalf the world's  most presecuted peoples: captured West  Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americans. Remembering the forgotten history of the international slave trade tribunals can teach us important lessons about the potential impact-and limitations-of modern courts like the International Criminal Court. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez's work reshapes the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.
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Contents
1.    Introduction
2.    Britain and the Slave Trade: The Rise of Abolitionism
3.    The United States and the Slave Trade: An Ambivalent Foe
4.    The courts of Mixed Commission for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
5.     Am I Not a Man and a Brother?
6.     Hostis Humani Generis: Enemies of Mankind
7.     From Crisis to Sucess: The Final Abolition of the Slave Trade
8.     A Bridge to the Future: Links to Contemporary International Human Rights Law
9.     International Human Rights Law and International courts: Rethinking Their Origins and Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
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Author Details
Jenny S.Martinez is Professor of Law and Warren Christopher Professor in the Practice of International Law and Diplomacy at Stanford Law School. She argued Rumsfeld v.Padilla before the U.S. Supreme Court and served as an associate legal officer at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavis in The Hague.
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