5th Forum on Minority Issues 28 September 2012 Mr Biram Abeid Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement in Mauritania Your Excellency Madam President, Your Excellencies Ms and Mr Ambassadors, Ms and Mr the representatives of NGOs, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me the opportunity to speak here in front of you, at the Palais des Nations, three months after my release from the jails of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, and two weeks after the presentation by the Mauritanian government of its periodic report on human rights in front of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Indeed, the reason for the Mauritanian government to put me in jail together with several of my friends from last 28 April, and the arguments used by the official delegation of my country before the UN Commissioners are intimately related. The pretext put forward by the scholars, imams, political parties, magistrates and those in power – in short, the bulk of the leadership and establishment in Mauritania – who are all from the dominant Arabo-Berber minority, consisted in excluding me from my community, or even from my social existence, in order to punish me for having symbolically burned copies of pieces written by legal advisers of slave-trading societies in the 9-15th centuries AC. These exegesis texts pretended to interpret the Quran and the gesture of the Prophet of Islam and led to producing the black code, whose essence is racist, fundamentally anti-humanist, and which has been a vehicle for stigmatisation and violation of universal principles of equality by birth and by law as well as violation of the spirit and essence of equality and justice in the Quran and the teachings of the Prophet. This ignominious corpus is still being taught in the schools of my country, legitimises over the dead bodies of the Black victims castration, trade of human beings, and rape, and recommends forced labour. The doctrine that follows is being sacralised and defended by the sentinels of this Orthodoxy, it tends to become sacred, and sets itself up a indisputable truth. Everything outside this truth is considered blasphemy, heresy, apostasy. Such doctrine splits Muslims into two categories, masters and slaves. Similarly, this archaic vision of the world forbids women to have leadership positions in the society, including preaching the law. According to those who promote such a vision of life, women are weak by nature, do not make rigorous judgements, are incapable of settling disputes equitably, and are congenitally exposed to satanic temptations. Thus, women are deemed to stay “underaged for life”, because