![]() The company added that it is currently investigating the allegations, and that it has informed the Responsible Minerals Initiative as part of their grievance mechanism.Īpple told CBS News the company has "led the industry by establishing the strictest standards for our suppliers and are constantly working to raise the bar for ourselves, and the industry." The company added that since 2016, it has published a full list of cobalt refiners every year, all of which participate in third-party audits. The suit demands a trial by jury for the plaintiffs, who include maimed child miners and the families of others killed in the cobalt mines.ĭell Technologies told CBS News in a statement that it's committed to "the responsible sourcing of minerals." The company denied it ever "knowingly sourced operations using any form of involuntary labor, fraudulent recruiting practices or child labor," and that it works with suppliers to manage sourcing programs responsibly. The complaint accuses the tech giants of "knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in Democratic Republic of Congo ('DRC') to mine cobalt." by the non-profit organization International Rights Advocates, on behalf of 13 anonymous plaintiffs from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The defendants named in the suit are Apple, Google parent company Alphabet, Microsoft, Dell and Tesla. Some of the biggest technology firms in the United States have been accused in a lawsuit of complicity in the death and maiming of hundreds, if not thousands of African children who mine cobalt, a mineral vital to the production of the lithium-ion batteries in everything from smartphones to electric cars. tech giants sued over deaths of child cobalt miners 03:34 Similarly Sony says it has launched an investigation, which also "so far" has not yielded any "obvious" signs that Sony products contain cobalt originating from Katanga in the DRC".U.S. HP says it had started an investigation with its suppliers but "as of now we have not found any linkage between our products and the DRC mine". It adds that "to our knowledge", these batteries are "not used in any product currently sold by Microsoft". It said that it did source batteries from a supplier that Amnesty says buys cobalt from CDM and Huayou but that this was a "very limited number of batteries for a product development project". Microsoft said it couldn't guarantee that none of the cobalt used in its products could be sourced back to the former Katanga province of DRC "due to our supply chain complexity". Samsung SDI does say, however, that "it is impossible for us to determine whether the cobalt supplied to Samsung SDI comes from DRC Katanga's mine". "As we gain a better understanding of the challenges associated with cobalt we believe our work in the African Great Lakes region and Indonesia will serve as important guides for creating lasting solutions".īoth Samsung and its supplier Samsung SDI say they do not source cobalt-derived battery parts from CDM or Huayou Cobalt - directly or indirectly. ![]() The report charts how this cobalt is then sold to Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese mineral giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Ltd (Huayou Cobalt). The report, prepared by Amnesty in conjunction with Afrewatch, documents how traders buy cobalt from the former province of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where child labour has been shown to be rife. It is high time the big brands took some responsibility for the mining of the raw materials that make their lucrative products." "Millions of people enjoy the benefits of new technologies but rarely ask how they are made. "The glamourous shop displays and marketing of state of the art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks, and miners in narrow man-made tunnels risking permanent lung damage," said Mark Dummett, business and human rights researcher at Amnesty International upon the publication of the report, This is what we die for: Human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo power the global trade in cobalt.
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