The justices ruled that the food company won the case with a score of 8 to 1. Six adult Malian citizens claimed that they were taken away as children and forced to work on a cocoa farm in neighboring Ivory Coast.

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court supported food giants Nestlé and Cargill in a lawsuit claiming that they deliberately purchased cocoa beans from African farms that use child labor.

The justices ruled that the food company won the case with a score of 8 to 1. Six adult Malian citizens claimed that they were taken away as children and forced to work on a cocoa farm in neighboring Ivory Coast.

The judges said that the appeal court was wrong to allow the group’s litigation to proceed.

“Although the defendant’s injury occurred entirely overseas, the Ninth Circuit found that the defendant could file a lawsuit in federal court because the defendant company allegedly made a’significant operational decision’ in the United States. The Ninth Circuit wrongly allowed the lawsuit Keep going,” Judge Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s majority opinion.

The case was dismissed twice in the early days before being resumed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. When the case was debated in December, the administration of then President Donald Trump supported Nestlé and Cargill.

The argument of this group from Mali is that Minneapolis-based Cargill and Switzerland-based Nestlé’s US branch “helped and abetted” their slavery as children, including purchases from farms that used child labor. Cocoa beans. The organization filed a lawsuit in an attempt to file a class action on behalf of themselves and the thousands of other former child slaves they said.

Nestlé and Cargill said they have taken measures to combat child slavery and denied any wrongdoing.

The case involved a law promulgated by the first Congress in 1789, the Alien Tort Act, which allowed foreign citizens to sue for human rights violations in US courts. The judge’s question is whether it allows lawsuits against American companies.

In recent years, the High Court has restricted the use of the “Foreign Tort Law”. In 2018, the court ruled that foreign companies should not be sued in accordance with the law. In this case, the court rejected attempts by Israeli victims of attacks in the West Bank and Gaza to use a US court to sue the Jordan-based Arab Bank, which they said provided funds for the attack.

The case is Nestlé USA v. Doe I, 19-416, and Cargill Corporation v. Doe I, 19-453.