A Mauritanian Abolitionist Visits the United States

At the end of June, Biram Dah Abeid, an anti-slavery activist from Mauritania who has led that country’s most successful abolitionist movement, arrived in the United States. He had been here before, to accept the United Nations Human Rights Prize for the work of his Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, in 2013, and to meet with organizations sympathetic to his cause. But this occasion was different. For the past eighteen months, Abeid had been in prison in Mauritania, along with a fellow-activist, Brahim Ramdhane, after being convicted of protesting without official authorization, belonging to an unauthorized organization, and stirring unrest. Abeid had been imprisoned before, for a few months at a time, for acts of protest, but this was by far his longest sentence.