Profiting from Misery: Are Human Rights Abuses Powering Your Smart Phone?
(COMMON DREAMS) Deirdre Fulton, January 20, 2016 — A damning new report issued Tuesday accuses Apple, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen, among other major multinational corporations, of failing to do basic checks to ensure that cobalt mined by child laborers has not been used in their products.
The investigation by Amnesty International and Afrewatch (Africa Resources Watch), an NGO based in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), traces the sale of cobalt, used in lithium-ion batteries for cell phones and electric cars, from mines where children as young as seven and adults work in “perilous conditions.”
“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 manmade tunnels risking permanent lung damage.”—Mark Dummett, Amnesty International
In the DRC—by far the single most important source of cobalt in the world, the report states—”the vast majority of miners spend long hours every day working with cobalt without the most basic of protective equipment, such as gloves, work clothes or facemasks to protect them from lung or skin disease,” according to Amnesty.