Child slaves: historical trial in the USA puts chocolate multinationals on the dock

Child slaves: historical trial in the USA puts chocolate multinationals on the dock

Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerous

Labor in inhumane and juvenile conditions, illegal hiring, human trafficking, but also forced marriages and abuse of power. Slavery still exists and how, it is part of the social fabric of the most varied corners of the world, in various forms it is still too present among the world population. Today, December 2nd, the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery and what emerges is that there is still a lot to do, even on the part of companies that should have hailed exploitation for some time now.





In fact, this is not the case and the last is proof of this ruling of the American Supreme Court concerning the question of some multinationals of chocolate Americans held responsible or not for the slavery of children on African farms from which they buy most of the cocoa. In essence, just yesterday the Supreme Court assessed the conclusion of legal actions against Nestlé and Cargill for child labor.

Read also: Fight against illegal hiring: all the points of the first National Plan against exploitation in the fields

The two companies are asking the nine judges to overturn a lower court ruling that allowed them to proceed with the lawsuit filed in 2005 on behalf of former Malian slave children who worked on farms.

International Day for the Abolition of Slavery

December 2 marks the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, to commemorate the day in 1949 when the General Assembly of the United Nations Convention approved measures for the repression of trafficking in persons and the exploitation of the prostitution of others.

According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), they are more than 40 million people in the world are victims of modern slavery. Although modern slavery is not defined by law, it is used as an umbrella term that covers practices such as:

  • forced labor
  • debt slavery
  • forced marriage
  • trafficking in human beings
  • sexual exploitation
  • the worst forms of child labor
  • the forced recruitment of children for use in armed conflict

Read also: Day against child labor: those millions of children who will never be happy and free to fly



Essentially, it refers to exploitative situations that a person cannot reject or abandon due to threats, violence, coercion, deception or abuse of power.

In addition, more than 150 million children are subjected to child labor, equivalent to nearly one in ten children worldwide. The ILO has adopted a new legally binding protocol designed to strengthen global efforts to eliminate forced labor, which went into effect in November 2016.

The US Supreme Court v Nestlé and Cargill

The Supreme Court of the United States received a request from Nestlé and Cargill companies on Tuesday 1 December to close the lawsuits against them for exploiting child labor on cocoa plantations in Côte d'Ivoire.

The two multinationals are effectively asking the nine judges to overturn a lower court ruling that allowed them to proceed with the lawsuit filed in 2005 on behalf of former Malian slave children who worked on farms.

What happened

Six Malians say they were recruited as children and enslaved on plantations in Cote d'Ivoire, where the American subsidiary of the Swiss group Nestlé and the American trading and processing giant Cargill buy cocoa.

In 2005, they filed a lawsuit in the United States against Nestlé USA and Cargill, claiming that the two companies knew what was going on on these plantations.

After 15 years, in short, did the defendants “know specifically that forced child labor was used in the farms or agricultural cooperatives with which they did business?” Asks Judge Samuel Alito.

After several twists and turns, federal courts have validated the procedure initiated under a 1789 law, the Alien Tort Statute, which allows non-U.S. Citizens to appeal to U.S. civil courts for violations of international law.



This law came about fifty years ago thanks to the encouragement of human rights defenders, but the Supreme Court has repeatedly limited its scope and in 2018 banned legal actions against foreign companies.

Nestlé and Cargill are now asking them to also exclude American companies and acts of "complicity".

Yet, they accuse, "the two groups have kept forced child labor in their supply chain to maintain a competitive advantage in the US market."

We'll see: the nine Supreme Court judges are expected to make their decision by the end of June 2021.

Font: ONU / Reuters

Read also:

  • Australian supermarkets threaten to take Nutella off the shelves after report on child exploitation in Turkey
  • Syrian refugees, including children, exploited in hazelnut fields to produce Nutella (and more)
  • The scandal of Syrian children exploited in clothing factories: the companies involved
  • 6 multinationals involved in slavery and the exploitation of child labor
  • The horror behind our jeans: the slavery of Bangladeshi children (PHOTO)

 

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