Yemeni right group vows to combat slavery

A Yemeni rights organization said on Sunday it has launched a campaign against slavery, which was abolished in 1962 but still appears to be the lot of hundreds of people in the impoverished country.

Hood "will work with its partners in civil society ... to end this crime," the non-governmental organization’s coordinator Mohammed Naji Allaw said on its website.

"A committee of dignitaries will visit the regions where those who practice slavery live, in order to explain to them the gravity of their crime," he said.

He also warned that the organization would "prosecute those who install themselves as masters and enslave other citizens, in criminal acts that the Yemeni law punishes by 10 years imprisonment."

The campaign follows a series of articles on al-Masdaronline news website on practices which affect "500 slaves" across the country.

Hood said investigations had revealed that the number of affected people was higher and that some Yemenis had confirmed "inheriting" slaves from their parents.

"It seems that the republic has failed" to abolish differences between social classes, a declared aim of its 1962 revolution which ended rule by an imam, the NGO said.

Hood said Yemen's prosecutor general, Abdullah al-society, had promised to order a probe.

The country in the southern Arabian peninsula is one of the world's most impoverished. It has a population of 24 million people and a strong tribal structure.