COCOA COMPANIES SEEK LEGAL IMMUNITY FOR CHILD SLAVERY
The major international cocoa company organizations, NATIONAL CONFECTIONERS ASSOCIATION, WORLD COCOA FOUNDATION, CAOBTSCO, and EUROPEAN COCOA ASSOCIATION, just filed an Amicus brief in the Court of appeals (see link below) asking the Court to rehear our recent victory against Nestle and Cargill. These companies all signed or endorsed the "Harkin-Engle Protocol" in 2001 promising to end child labor in their supply chains. This was a clear admission that they WERE profiting from child slavery, and they were pledging to gradually phase out the system that has allowed them to profit from child slavery. They then gave themselves three unilateral extensions of time to stop using child slaves during which they knowingly profited from the misery of trafficked child slaves. In July 2018, the World Cocoa Foundation announced that they would NOT meet their new deadline of 2020 to merely reduce by 75% their use of child slavery. So after 19 years of a free pass to use child slaves, the companies have casually announced they will continue to do so indefinitely. No new unilateral deadline was set by the companies. Rather than focus their full resources and attention to stop profiting from child slavery, these companies are combining to try to stop our legal case against Nestle and Cargill, the one legal process that might actually force them to stop their admitted evil practice of profiting from child slavery. If there was ever any doubt, these companies will continue to use child slaves as long as they possibly can, and they will only stop when we force them to with a combination of legal action and consumer pressure. Help International Rights Advocates lead the way to free the child slaves who are being exploited and tortured to enrich a gang of corporate criminals.