Stakeholder Summary >> Algeria, Review Documentation, 41st session, November 2022

JS16 referred to the practice of enslavement of black families. The alarming testimonies received include the account of a young girl who was enslaved at the age of six years by a Sahrawi family in the refugee camps, before she fled to Spain and filed a lawsuit for slavery. Young black people in the camps of Tindouf – faced with the indifference of the camps’ leaders, almost all of whom have slaves to carry out domestic chores and graze their livestock – have organized an informal group known as the freedom and progress association for the fight against slavery, which has identified 7,130 slaves yet to be emancipated in the camps, including women, who are raped, married against their will and sent into the desert to look after their masters’ livestock. Nine black women have died while giving birth without medical assistance in the middle of the desert and three other slaves have died of thirst. [Para 30]