terryatIRAdvocates

Sure. We sued Tesla in the cobalt battery for EV's case because their supply chain was more easily observed and documented because California law requires CA companies to disclose suppliers in their supply chain. This highlights disclosure laws are helpful in this work to identify companies' suppliers and celebrate those that do good work. ALL companies that are making EV's are using the same cobalt mined by children in the DRC, that includes BMW, Daimler (makes Mercedes), Ford, GM, and Chrysler. We hope to be able to add them in a future complaint.

We continue to look for companies that are responsible so that we can promote them and work with them so that we can put pressure on companies that are not doing the right things. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any large companies with international supply chains that are acting responsibly.

Virtually all companies, unfortunately, with a global supply chain have serious issues of human rights violations. Because we have limited time and resources, I have been focused on what I think are the worst offenders, companies that profit from enslaved children or from children who are forced to performed extremely hazardous work. My current work involves the cocoa sector and cobalt mining. In cocoa, we have sued Nestle, Cargill, Mars, Hershey, Mondelez, Barry Callebaut, and Olam. These companies are among those who continue to profit from enslaved children who harvest their cocoa and perform extremely hazardous work such as using machetes and applying dangerous chemicals. In the cobalt case, we have sued Apple, Tesla, Dell, Microsoft, and Google because they are knowingly participating with cobalt suppliers that use forced child labor under conditions where child miners are regularly killed and maimed. I think these are the worst offenders of human rights in these sectors, not only because of the horrific conditions that child workers face, but because these companies are extremely wealthy and powerful and could easily work with us to solve the problem. Instead, they hire giant law firms and public relation firms to defend and delay their ability to profit from these horrific practices.

Thanks for remembering Steven u/sunkencorony! He is a good friend of mine. Unfortunately, I too have been sued for defamation and RICO by Drummond Coal, a company I have sued. Increasingly, corporations are going after human rights lawyers to cause them to spend enormous amount of time and resources defending against frivolous cases. In my case, I countersued Drummond and we hope to set an example for others on how to deal with this despicable practice by these companies.

Well, it might be hard to do this, but I think it's important to focus on one serious Nestle crime at a time. We have sued them twice for harvesting cocoa using enslaved children. Both cases are still pending and I'm optimistic that we will ultimately prevail. Nestle will certainly use its power and resources to delay as long as possible accountability for its admitted use of child labor. They acknowledged in 2001 when they signed the Harkin-Engle protocol that child labor was a serious problem in their cocoa supply chain. Since doing that they have employed a delay strategy by giving themselves three unilateral extensions of time. We need to win one of our cases so that Nestle can no longer be in charge of when it is going to stop profiting from child labor.

In the meantime, we are asking everyone to contact the company directly or social media and make clear that you will not purchase ANY Nestle product until they keep their promise to stop using child labor to harvest their cocoa. Once we solve that problem, I'm happy to work with others to select another Nestle crime to focus on together.

Yes, it certainly is but please do what you can to help solve the problems. When we come together, there is greater hope that we can change things for the better.