\n A Mauritanian court on Thursday upheld a two-year prison sentence against three anti-slavery activists who were arrested during a protest against bondage in the west African nation.\n<\/p>\n
\n Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid, runner-up in the 2014 presidential elections and head of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), was jailed in January alongside two other activists.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"The (appeals) court upheld the sentences,\" a judicial source told AFP. The failure of the activists' appeal was confirmed by a spokesman for the IRA.\n<\/p>\n
\n The two others convicted were Bilal Ramdane, an assistant to Ould Abeid, and Djiby Sow, a civic and cultural rights campaigner.\n<\/p>\n
\n Sow has however since been released on parole due to health problems.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"This is a step backwards for freedom in our country, an example of judicial authorities submissiveness to executive orders,\" said defense lawyer Brahim Ould Ebetty, who boycotted the hearing along with his clients.\n<\/p>\n
\n He slammed a \"parody of justice\" just two weeks after Mauritania adopted a new law to crack down on slavery which activists say is widespread in the west African nation despite being criminalised in 2007.\n<\/p>\n
\n The new law declared slavery a \"crime against humanity\", criminalises a raft of new forms of slavery such as forced marriage, and doubles maximum prison terms to 20 years.\n<\/p>\n
\n Slavery is deeply entrenched in the vast, largely desert nation where light-skinned Berber Arab Moors enslaved local black populations after settling in Mauritania centuries ago.\n<\/p>\n
\n Slave status is also often passed on from generation to generation, said the Australia-based Walk Free Movement which estimated in its 2014 Global Slavery Index that there were 156,000 slaves in Mauritania, or some four percent of the population.\n<\/p>\n
\n The country was the last in the world to abolish slavery, in 1981, and since 2007 its practice has been officially designated a crime.\n<\/p>\n
\n However activists accused government of failing to implement the laws.\n<\/p>\n
\n Sarah Mathewson of Anti-Slavery International told AFP only one person had ever been convicted under the old law, and many cases watered down to \"unpaid labour\".\n<\/p>\n
\n The three activists were arrested in November 2014 while protesting slavery in a move Amnesty International said was \"politically motivated\".\n<\/p>\n
\n They were found guilty of \"belonging to an illegal organisation, leading an unauthorised rally, and violence against the police.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Mauritanian authorities have accused the IRA of spreading \"racist propaganda\"\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We feel that there is hypocrisy because (authorities) seem more intent on prosecuting anti-slavery activists than applying the existing law which was perfectly valid and could have been very effective except there was resistance to enforcing it,\" said Mathewson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Mauritanian court on Thursday upheld a two-year prison sentence against three anti-slavery activists who were arrested during a protest against bondage in the west African nation. Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid, runner-up in the 2014 presidential elections and head of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), was jailed in January […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n