ABSTRACT
The book now turns to focus more directly on the operation and jurisprudence of Mixed Commissions with the aim of drawing out the conditions that determined recaptives’ legal lives. Its general aim is twofold: first, to identify how international slave trade repression law constructed recaptives; and, second, to identify recaptives’ contributions to slave trade repression litigation. This chapter, which focuses on recaptives’ testimony and the preoccupation of Mixed Commissions with intervention, also serves as an introduction to the operation of Mixed Commissions. The counter-legal history put forward here is important for its own sake, but it also provides historical context from which to consider contemporary thinking about victims in international criminal law, which is further explored in Chapter 7. The primary argument that unfolds over the course of this and the following chapter focuses on cases in which slave ships were captured in violation of the relevant slave trade repression treaties. These cases are revealing because they demonstrate the law’s focus on intervention. I argue that in these cases, Mixed Commissions were more effective in expanding captors’ rights to intervene, and protecting captors from damages, than in formally safeguarding the rights of recaptives as a matter of general legal principle (even though in most cases in-person restoration was fortunately avoided) (Haslam 2016). Expanding intervention and reducing damages payable for unlawful captures of unlawfully trading slave ships was intended – and may well have had – the effect of restricting the unlawful slave trade. However, it is significant that within the framework of slave trade repression law the mechanism Mixed Commissioners used in these cases did not expand directly the circumstances in which recaptives could be formally emancipated. However, despite this limited legal framing of recaptives, recaptives influenced the law in important – but largely unacknowledged – ways. This chapter emphasises the role of recaptives’ testimony.
