U.S. appeals court dismissed child labor case against major tech companies, including Apple and Google

A federal appeals court has dismissed a child labor case against major tech companies including Apple and Google.

The ruling, released Tuesday, ruled in favor of the tech companies — Google parent company Alphabet, Apple, Dell Technologies, Microsoft and Tesla — and rejected an appeal by former child miners.

The former child miners argued that the major companies knowingly engaged in “forced labor” when purchasing cobalt, which is used in producing lithium-ion batteries for electronics.

The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., by nongovernmental organization International Right Advocates. It alleged that two mining companies, British company Glencore and Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, supplied cobalt to the companies.

The tech giants that purchased the cobalt were “aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children” in Democratic Republic of the Congo mines.

The three-judge panel ruled Tuesday that the plaintiffs have standing to pursue their damages claims but the companies that purchased an “unspecified amount of cobalt through the global supply chain is not ‘participation in a venture’” under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.

Circuit Judge Neomi Rao said the former child miners couldn’t prove that the tech companies had the power to stop the use of child labor in the mining process and that the tech giants had anything more than a buyer-seller relationship with the cobalt supply companies.

“As alleged in the complaint, the participants in the cobalt market intentionally use a murky supply chain to obscure the extent to which they rely on forced labor,” Rao wrote in the ruling. “This allows the Tech Companies and their suppliers to avoid formal association with forced labor, yet everyone in the venture knows the global supply chain includes cobalt procured by forced labor.”

Terry Collingsworth, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told Reuters that his clients might appeal further. The decision Tuesday proves that there is a “strong incentive to avoid any transparency with their suppliers, even as they promise the public they have ‘zero tolerance’ policies against child labor.”

The Hill has reached out to Collingsworth for further comment.