Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery
The ACE conducted a global investigation concerning slavery, slave trade and force labor, and recommended solutions to address the issue.
The League of Nations had conducted an active work against chattel slavery and slave trade from the early 1920s.
[3] It was to be purely advisory and its proceedings confidential, composed of seven independent experts, appointed indefinitely, who were to study the documented evidence and submit reports to suggest methods to approve the work to end slavery and the slave trade.
The committee asked for reports from all member countries of the League of Nations, including the major colonial empires of the time.
[6] In 1936 the report to the Advisory Committee of Experts on Slavery from the French, British and Italian stated that they all surveyed the water sources along the caravan routes in the Sahara to combat the Trans-Saharan slave trade from Nigeria to North Africa.
[6] At this point in time, Saudi Arabia was the biggest slave nation in the world, but it was protected from investigation by its ally Britain, who avoided to give any clear information in order to avoid damaging their relationship to Saudi, and gave only vague deflecting answers that Islam encouraged manumission.
[12] In reality, the British reports were deliberately playing down the size of the actual substantial slave trade going on in the region.
[17][page needed] The report to ACE about Hadhramaut described the existence of Chinese women trafficked from Singapore for enslavement as concubines, Indian women trafficked to Hadrhamaut to be sold by their husbands, and Indian children officially taken there for religious studies, only to be sold upon arrival.
[18] The British tried to convince the coastal local rulers of the Aden Protectorate to sign an agreement to ban the slave trade, but by January 1939, few had done so.
[21] The Quran was relevant in the context since chattel slavery by this point in time existed mainly in Muslim lands.
[23] The work of the ACE collected information only from published sources, petitions, personal experience, government reports and vetted NGOs; and while it was inhibited by the colonial powers' (such as Britain's reluctance to interfere in the chattel slavery in the Arabian Peninsula), it did result in both the British and the French colonial powers refining their anti-slavery law policies.
