NIAMEY (Reuters) - A woman in Niger who was kept as a domestic and sexual slave for a decade launched legal action against the government on Monday for failing to implement laws against slavery, two UK-based rights groups said.
Anti-Slavery International said Hadijatou Mani was sold into slavery for around $500 at the age of 12, forced to carry out unpaid domestic and agricultural work and regularly beaten and sexually abused by her master.
A second London-based rights group, Interights, is helping lawyers in Niger bring Mani's case before the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) court of justice in Niger's capital, Niamey.
"Despite the criminalisation of slavery in 2003, the government of Niger is accused of not only failing to protect Hadijatou Mani from the practice of slavery but also continuing to legitimise this practice through its customary law," Anti-Slavery International and Interights said in a statement.
Anti-Slavery International says 43,000 people live as slaves in Niger, born into an established slave class whose members can be inherited or given as gifts and who are denied basic rights.
Niger's government has passed laws setting sentences of up to 30 years and heavy fines for people convicted of keeping slaves. But very few cases have come before the courts.
Campaigners say slavery in Niger effectively operates as a caste system in which unpaid servants are kept by landowners or nomads who set them to work tending goats, collecting water or looking after children from dawn to midnight.
Many live as serfs, paying tithes of their harvests to their masters who claim rights to their land like feudal barons.
Interights and Anti-Slavery International said Mani's master gave her a "liberation certificate" in 2005, but when she tried to leave, he refused to let her go, claiming her as his wife.
They said she was later imprisoned for six months for bigamy when she married another man of her own will.
The London-based rights groups said if Mani were to win her case, the outcome would set a legal precedent across West Africa with respect to protection from slavery as ECOWAS court decisions are applicable to all member states.
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