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US Alien Tort Statute

Child laborers bring case against food companies: “You’re enabling enslavement”

By Irit Tamir - Oxfam, September 26, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The US Alien Tort Statute is pried back open for foreign victims of corporate human rights abuses to find justice.

A class action suit brought by a group of trafficked children from Mali to the US 9th Circuit Court may have an impact on how corporations develop their business models in the future.

In John Doe et al v. Nestle et al, child plaintiffs argued that Nestle, ADM, and Cargill aided and abetted enslavement (and numerous violations of international and US law) in the companies’ cocoa supply chains. The former child slave laborers were allegedly trafficked by cocoa growers into Cote D’Ivoire and forced to work in fields that supplied cocoa beans to the defendants in the case. The court held that they could bring the action under the US Alien Tort Statute. Since 1980, courts have interpreted this statute to allow foreign citizens to seek remedies in US courts for human rights violations for conduct committed outside US borders.

For too long now, many industries have profited from inhuman working conditions, seeing labor as yet another line item that can be manipulated in terms of cost. Driving working conditions and wages to the lowest common denominator keeps the costs of commodities as low as possible. It is well known that enslavement conditions and child labor are often too common in the production of palm oil, tomatoes, strawberries, and cocoa, as well as in the mining sector.

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