On 4 November 2017, the UN Migration Agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), published a report highlighting the crime of enslavement occurring in North Africa, particularly Niger and Libya.1 The chief IOM spokesman in Geneva, Leonard Doyle, described the victims as ‘commodities to be bought, sold and discarded’.2 The enslavement involved ‘Sub-Saharan migrants . . . being sold and bought by Libyans, with the support of Ghanaians and Nigerians who work for them’.3 This state of affairs chimes well with not just legal history in that the slave ‘was the one human being who could be owned’,4 legally speaking, but matches closely, as we shall see, contemporary legal definitions of enslavement as either ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’ (based upon Article 1, clause 1 of the Slavery Convention of 1926) that has in turn led to enslavement’s categorization as an act that qualifies as a crime against humanity.5