129. Article 2 of the Charter states that: Every individual shall be entitled to the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms recognised and guaranteed in the present Charter without distinction of any kind such as race, ethnic group, colour… 130. The representative of the government as well as the authors of the communications declared that many Black Mauritanians were forced to flee or were detained, tortured or killed because of the colour of their skin, and that the situation in Mauritania became explosive due to the extreme positions adopted by the francophone and arabophone factions that were in opposition to each other in the country. 131. Article 2 of the Charter lays down a principle that is essential to the spirit of this convention, one of whose goals is the elimination of all forms of discrimination and to ensure equality among all human beings. The same objective under-pins the Declaration of the Rights of People Belonging to National, Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in resolution 47/135 of 18 December 1992. Article 1,1 of this document indeed stipulates that “States shall protect the existence and national or ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic identity of the minorities within their respective territories and shall stimulate the establishment of conditions conducive to the promotion of such identity.” From the foregoing, it is apparent that international human rights law and the community of States accord a certain importance to the eradication of discrimination in all its guises. Various texts adopted at the global and regional levels have indeed affirmed this repeatedly. Consequently, for a country to subject its own indigenes to discriminatory treatment only because of the colour of their skin is an unacceptable discriminatory attitude and a violation of the very spirit of the African Charter and of the letter of its article 2. 132. Article 5 of the Charter states that: All forms of exploitation and degradation of man particularly slavery … shall be prohibited. 133. Communications 54/91 and 98/93 allege that a majority of the Mauritanian population is composed of slaves. The government states that slavery had been abolished under the French colonial regime. The communications also allege that freed slaves maintain traditional and close links with their former masters and that this constitutes another form of exploitation. 134. During its mission to Mauritania in June 1996, the Commission’s delegation noted that it was still possible to find people considered as slaves in certain parts of the country. Though Edict Nº 81-234 of 9 November had officially abolished slavery in Mauritania, it was not followed by effective measures aimed at the eradication of 23