Case background
On 12 February 2021, IRAdvocates filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of eight Malian plaintiffs against Cargill, Nestlé, Mondelēz, Hershey, Olam, Barry Callebaut, and Mars. They alleged they were trafficked from Mali to the Ivory Coast and forced to work on small cocoa suppliers under conditions including excessive working hours, unpaid wages, lack of food, unsafe pesticide use without protection, and exposure to dangerous animals.
In 2022, a US District Court dismissed the case, ruling the plaintiffs had not sufficiently linked the defendants to the farms where they worked.
Court of Appeals decision
On 22 July, the Appeals Court upheld the District Court’s dismissal, finding that:
- The plaintiffs relied primarily on broad statistics, including that the defendants purchase about 70% of Ivorian cocoa.
- The plaintiffs could not establish a specific link between the workers and the cocoa imported by the defendants, establishing only that some of the farms where they worked were located in regions supplying the defendants. This does not meet the thresholds under the TVPRA
IRAdvocates has not yet announced whether it intends to appeal this case further.
IRAdvocates cocoa sector cases
In addition to the TVPRA, which has been largely unsuccessful for IRAdvocates in recent cases, the organis12.8.25 Mark email ation has tried several other avenues to target alleged child labour practices in cocoa supply chains.
- In 2023, IRAdvocates reportedly filed a lawsuit in the US Court of International Trade asking the judge to force US authorities to block imports of cocoa harvested by child labour in west Africa.
- In 2021, the US Supreme Court dismissed an IRAdvocates case against Nestle and Cargill for child and forced labour practices in cocoa production in Ivory Coast brought under the Alien Tort Statute.
- In 2020, IRAdvocates filed a petition with CBP to ban cocoa by nine companies including those in this litigation, which it alleged used child labour to harvest cocoa in Ivory Coast.