International Criminal Law and Legal Memories of Abolition: Intervention, Mixed Commission Courts and 'Emancipation'

This article provides a critical reading of four cases that took place before nineteenth century Mixed Commissions on the Slave Trade at Sierra Leone. Mixed Commissions were early institutional sites where international law was confronted with multiple victims. Although they had the power to emancipate slaves, Mixed Commissions did not do so as a result of rights attributed to slaves as human beings. Rather the capacity of Mixed Commissions to emancipate depended upon the legality of the detention of the slave ship on which slaves were found. This legal link between emancipation and lawful intervention left slaves in a potentially precarious legal position. However, in two of the cases examined here the worst effects of this were avoided through slave resistance. This article aims to contribute to ongoing scholarly critiques of international criminal legal histories by interrogating how abolition has been remembered in international law.