Copies of the complaint available online

A leading human rights organization sued the Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill companies today in Federal District Court in Los Angeles for involvement in the trafficking, torture, and forced labor of children who cultivate and harvest cocoa beans which the companies import from Africa. The suit was brought under two federal statutes, the Torture Victims Protection Act and the Alien Tort Claims Act

The Washington, DC-based International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), along with Alabama-based civil rights firm Wiggins, Childs, Quinn & Pantazis, LLC, filed suit on behalf of a class of Malian children who were trafficked from Mali into the Ivory Coast and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings. The three children acting as class representative plaintiffs are proceeding anonymously, as John Does, because of feared retaliation by the farm owners where they worked.

"It is unconscionable that Nestle, ADM and Cargill have ignored repeated and well-documented warnings over the past several years that the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave labor. They could have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had to go to court as a last resort," said ILRF attorney, Natacha Thys.

Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group, has also joined the Complaint and, along with the former child laborers, have also sued Nestle under California's unfair business practice law for false or misleading statements. Global Exchange alleges that to date no effective steps have been taken by the companies to prevent the use of child labor on farms producing cocoa for companies like Nestle, and that these companies have nevertheless led their members and the public to believe otherwise.

Global Exchange will also sponsor demonstrations against Nestle in cities all over the U.S. timed with the opening of the film, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

The complaint follows the July 1, 2005 deadline identified in a voluntary industry initiative, known as the Harkin-Engel Protocol, to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in the West African cocoa industry. A key part of the Protocol was an obligation to have in place an independent and credible system of farm monitoring, certification, and verification to ensure that child labor was not still taking place, and to also have effective programs on the ground to address and rehabilitate child laborers. The industry failed to establish such a system by the July 1, 2005 deadline, several years since reported stories of child labor in the West Africa cocoa sector began to appear and three years since the Protocol was announced.