Swiss giant, Nestle, will be sued over allegations that it used child slaves to harvest cocoa in the Ivory Coast in Africa…the US Supreme Court rejected the appeal by Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill to dismiss the lawsuit. The case first came into surface on 14 July 2005, when three individuals from Mali and Global Exchange filed a class action lawsuit in California federal court against the three companies. According to Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, the individuals alleged they had been trafficked from Mali as child slaves and forced to work harvesting and/or cultivating cocoa beans on farms in the Ivory Coast…The plaintiffs allege that the companies aided and failed to prevent the torture, forced labor and arbitrary detention that they had suffered as child slaves. The plaintiffs further claimed that the companies’ economic benefit from the labor of children violates international labor conventions, the law of nations and customary international law...[I]n 2012, seven years after the shocking revelations, the Swiss giant decided to establish a monitoring and remediation system in farmer cooperatives to raise awareness about child labor and to identify children at risk…
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