Fish market in Nouakchott. Evgeni Zotov/flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
In mid-September 2017 a US delegation of anti-slavery activists, including Jonathan Jackson, the son of Reverend Jesse Jackson and the spokesman of the US civil rights organisation Rainbow PUSH Coalition, was denied access to Mauritania. A few months before, the French journalist Tiphaine Gosse and the French human rights lawyer Marie Foray were expelled from the country under the accusation of working with the unauthorised local organisation Initiative pour la résurgence du mouvement abolitionniste en Mauritanie (IRA Mauritanie).
Slavery in Mauritania differs from what is often meant by ‘modern slavery’ in other contexts.
