2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) For decades, antislavery actors — scholars, governments and activists — have asserted that slavery has already been made illegal in every country in the world. 5 However, this understanding of slavery’s universal domestic illegality represents an erroneous assumption based on a misunderstanding of its definition, revealing something far less unique about the prohibition of slavery: an ongoing struggle to achieve in practice the domestic implementation of a norm agreed to in principle at international law. 6 Although the international norms are designed to protect individuals from abuse, and to ensure that every person receives this protection through citizenship in a state, this does not always pan out in reality. By mapping all United Nations member states’ international commitments and domestic legislation related to slavery, we not only reveal the current realities of domestic implementation, but also provide a vital tool for advocates seeking to address ongoing limitations in states’ domestication of international law in this area. 7 I THE CHALLENGES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW IN PROHIBITING SLAVERY In general, states make a multitude of international commitments, pledging themselves at the international level to refrain from, and engage in, a variety of different behaviours and making themselves accountable to other states for actions contravening these frameworks. Traditionally, these obligations concerned and regulated only states’ interactions with one another. International law had no place interfering with the sovereignty of states to act as they saw fit within their own borders, and the individual had no place in the international legal system, except in a limited sense as representatives or agents of the state and in their ability to act on behalf of their citizens abroad. 8 However, beginning with the antislavery instruments, and carrying through to the development of human rights law, international law began to concern itself both with the way states acted within their own territories and jurisdiction, and with individuals as subjects of international law benefiting from limited rights and duties. Antislavery treaties represented a step-change in international law, requiring states take legislative action to address a practice occurring within their own borders (slavery) and not only transnationally (international slave trade). However, despite states undertaking explicit obligations to ensure their domestic laws captured the prohibitions against human exploitation, practice in this regard remained scarce. The fundamental premise of states’ sovereignty within their own territories continued to underpin the international legal system. Yet, accountability for these commitments in the international arena required states intervene in other 5 6 7 8 See, eg, ‘Modern-Day Slavery’, New York Times (online, 9 September 2000) <https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/09/opinion/modern-day-slavery.html>; Nita Bhalla, ‘What Can Governments do to Prevent Slavery?’, World Economic Forum (online, 21 October 2015) <https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/10/what-can-governments-do-toprevent-slavery/>; ‘Ethics Guide: Modern Slavery’ BBC (Web Page) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/slavery/modern/modern_1.shtml>. See Katarina Schwarz and Jean Allain, Antislavery in Domestic Legislation: An Empirical Analysis of National Prohibition Globally (Report, Rights Lab and Castan Centre for Human Rights Law February 2020) <https://antislaverylaw.ac.uk/resources/summary-of-findings/>. This paper is based on a new database of international commitments and domestic legislation created by the authors — Katarina Schwarz and Jean Allain, Antislavery in Domestic Legislation (Database, 12 February 2020) <https://antislaverylaw.ac.uk>. All data and conclusions on domestic law are drawn from this dataset. See generally Bardo Fassbender, Daniel Högger and Anne Peters (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford University Press 2012) 27. 160