Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Abolishing Slavery and its Contemporary Forms

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30. In this section the review will summarize briefly the various forms of slavery and slavery-like
practices.
A. Serfdom
31. Serfdom has been categorized as a form of slavery since the first discussions preceeding the
adoption of the Slavery Convention of 1926. In its final report to the League of Nations, the Tem-
porary Slavery Commission regarded serfdom as the equivalent of “predial slavery”, that is to say
the use of slaves on farms or plantations for agricultural production.
35
The requirement contained
in the Slavery Convention of 1926, “to bring about, progressively and as soon as possible, the
complete abolition of slavery in all its forms,” consequently applies to serfdom as well as slavery.
32. The Temporary Slavery Commission also noted in a 1924 report that many people were
found in “agricultural debt bondage” which combined elements of both debt bondage and serf-
dom.
36
That conclusion was confirmed by later investigations by the International Labour Orga-
nization (ILO) into the status and conditions of indigenous labour in Latin America during the
1940s.
37
Both serfdom and debt bondage are sometimes referred to by the term “peonage”, par-
ticularly in the Latin American context.
38
33. The Supplementary Convention of 1956 categorizes serfdom as a form of “servile status”,
and defines it as “the condition or status of a tenant who is by law, custom or agreement bound to
live and labour on land belonging to another person and to render some determinate service to
such other person, whether for reward or not, and is not free to change his status” (art. 1(b)). Land
tenure systems viewed in all their aspects – legal, economic, social and political – can in certain
circumstances be seen as oppressive power relationships arising from ownership or use of land
and disposition of its products to create forms of servitude and bondage.
39
34. Records of discussions that occurred both in the United Nations and in the ILO before the
adoption of the Supplementary Convention in 1956 indicate that the term “serfdom” was intended
to apply to a range of practices reported in Latin American countries and more generally referred
to as “peonage”.
40
Those practices, which had developed in a context of conquest, subjugation
of indigenous peoples, and seizure of their lands, involved a landowner granting a piece of land
to an individual “serf” or “peon” in return for specific services, including (1) providing the land-
owner with a proportion of the crop at harvest (“share cropping”), (2) working for the landowner
or (3) doing other work, for example domestic chores for the landowner’s household. In each case,
it is not the provision of labour in return for access to land that is in itself considered a form of
servitude, but the inability of the person of serf status to leave that status. The term “serfdom” and
35
Temporary Slavery Commission Report to the Council, League of Nations document A.19.1925.VI (1925), para.
97. Slaves involved in growing and harvesting sugar cane in the West Indies in the eighteenth century were classified
as “praediala” or predial slaves. See Seymour Drescher and Stanley L Engerman, eds., “Caribbean Agriculture”, in A
Historical Guide to World Slavery, (1998), p. 113.
36
Ibid.
37
Report for the Committee of Experts on Indigenous Labour, ILO document (1951), p. 135.
38
See section on Debt Bondage, infra.
39
See report of the Working Group on Slavery on its fifth session, United Nations document E/CN/4/Sub.2/434
(1979), paras. 10-16.
40
C. W. W. Greenidge, Slavery at the United Nations (1954), p. 8.