Congo Energy Lawsuit: Cobalt, Child Labor, and the D.C. Circuit Ruling

The main cobalt mining child labor lawsuit against Big Tech — Doe v. Apple, filed in December 2019 against Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla — was dismissed by a federal district court in 2021, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed that dismissal on March 5, 2024. The courts held that buying cobalt through a global supply chain, even with knowledge of abuses, is not enough to make an end-purchaser legally responsible under the federal anti-trafficking statute the plaintiffs used. New litigation against Apple and parallel regulatory efforts are continuing.¹

Who Filed the Case and What It Claimed

The Washington-based nonprofit International Rights Advocates filed Jane Doe 1, et al. v. Apple Inc., Alphabet, Inc., Microsoft, Inc., Dell Technologies, Inc., and Tesla, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on December 16, 2019. The 14 plaintiffs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo were either children seriously injured in cobalt mining accidents or family members of children killed in the mines. Lead counsel was Terry Collingsworth, IRAdvocates’ founder.²

The complaint alleged the five companies knowingly benefited from a system that relied on forced child labor to extract cobalt for lithium-ion batteries. Children as young as six were described working in hand-dug, unsupported tunnels for two or three dollars a day. One plaintiff, born in 2001, was buried alive in an April 2018 tunnel collapse at a Glencore-linked mine; his body was never recovered. Another was paralyzed from the chest down at age 15 after falling into a tunnel while carrying cobalt sacks for about 75 cents a day. A third lost his left leg after being struck by a cobalt transport truck at a site controlled by a subsidiary of the Chinese processor Huayou Cobalt.³⁴

The legal claims were brought under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), which allows victims of forced labor to sue anyone who “knowingly benefits” from “participation in a venture” involving trafficking. The complaint also included common law claims for unjust enrichment, negligent supervision, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.²

The Supply Chain the Plaintiffs Described

The lawsuit traced cobalt from artisanal mines in the DRC’s Katanga and Lualaba provinces through two main intermediaries: Glencore, the Swiss mining company whose subsidiary Kamoto Copper Company operates large mines in the region, and Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, whose DRC subsidiary Congo Dongfang Mining bought ore from local traders sourcing directly from artisanal diggers. From there, refiners like the Belgian company Umicore processed the material and sold refined product to the tech defendants.⁵⁶

Researcher Siddharth Kara, a Harvard fellow who worked with IRAdvocates and later wrote Cobalt Red, argued there is no meaningful separation between artisanal and industrial cobalt production in the DRC because ore from freelance diggers is routinely absorbed into formal supply chains.⁷

How the Companies Responded

All five defendants denied responsibility. At a July 2021 hearing, defense counsel argued the companies were merely “buying cobalt” and lacked a “sufficient relationship” with mine operators to be liable.²

Each pointed to its own sourcing policies. Apple said it had “led the industry” with strict standards, publishing annual refiner lists subject to third-party audits and removing six refiners in 2019 for failing to meet its requirements. Google called child labor “unacceptable” and cited its supplier code of conduct. Microsoft called the suit “without merit.” Dell said it was “committed to the responsible sourcing of minerals.” Tesla maintained a “zero-tolerance policy for child labor,” though its own shareholders had criticized the policy as ineffective.⁸⁹

The plaintiffs countered that these voluntary programs were evidence the companies knew about serious child labor problems, not evidence they were fixing them. The complaint called the companies’ whistleblowing mechanisms useless to “largely illiterate, desperately poor, and exceedingly vulnerable people” living in a violent region without internet or cell phone access.³

Why the District Court Dismissed the Case

On November 2, 2021, Judge Carl J. Nichols dismissed the case. He found the plaintiffs lacked standing because they could not adequately connect the tech companies’ conduct to their specific injuries; no defendant had employed them or owned the mines where they were hurt. He also rejected the argument that a global supply chain constitutes a “venture” under the TVPRA, writing that “it takes many analytical leaps to say that the end-purchasers of a fungible metal are responsible for the conditions in which that metal might or might not have been mined.” He further questioned whether the TVPRA’s civil remedy reached conduct occurring entirely overseas.¹⁰

The D.C. Circuit’s 2024 Decision

On March 5, 2024, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — Chief Judge Srinivasan and Circuit Judges Pillard and Rao — affirmed the dismissal in an opinion by Judge Neomi Rao, with no dissents or concurrences.¹

The panel partially reversed the lower court on standing, holding that plaintiffs could pursue TVPRA damages, but agreed they could not seek injunctive relief because they were former miners and it was “entirely speculative” whether an injunction against five end-purchasers would change conditions in distant informal mines.¹¹

On the merits, the court defined “participation in a venture” as “taking part or sharing in an enterprise or undertaking that involves danger, uncertainty, or risk, and potential gain.” A formal business relationship was not required, but “something more than engaging in an ordinary buyer-seller transaction” was. Purchasing cobalt through a global supply chain, even in large volumes, did not clear that bar. The companies’ relationships with their cobalt suppliers were arm’s-length transactions without shared profits, shared risks, or direct control over mining operations. The court did not reach the extraterritoriality question because the participation issue was enough to dispose of the case. No further appeals appear in the record as of mid-2026.¹⁰

What the Ruling Means for Supply-Chain Liability

The decision exposed a gap between the TVPRA’s text and its practical reach. The statute lets victims sue those who “knowingly benefit” from “participation in a venture” involving trafficking, but courts have interpreted those terms narrowly when the defendant sits at the end of a long global supply chain rather than directly alongside the abusers. A 2024 NYU Law Review analysis described the outcome as part of a broader pattern in which TVPRA supply-chain claims fail at the motion-to-dismiss stage, with courts applying a more restrictive reading of “participation in a venture” in international cases than in domestic ones.¹²

In practical terms, that means U.S. victims of forced labor abroad face a steep barrier to holding American companies liable for buying products made with that labor. The defendants’ knowledge of conditions in the mines was not, by itself, enough. What was missing, in the court’s view, was the kind of close, cooperative relationship that would make a purchaser part of the trafficking venture rather than a customer of it.

New Litigation Against Apple

IRAdvocates has not stopped. On November 25, 2025, the organization filed a new lawsuit against Apple in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Rather than the TVPRA, this complaint uses the D.C. Consumer Protection Procedures Act, alleging that Apple’s marketing about responsible mineral sourcing is false and deceptive given that its supply chain includes cobalt and coltan linked to child labor, forced labor, and armed groups in the DRC and Rwanda. The complaint names three Chinese smelters it says processed coltan smuggled through Rwanda after armed groups seized mines in eastern Congo. It seeks an injunction against the allegedly deceptive advertising and reimbursement of legal costs, but not damages or class certification.¹³¹⁴

Apple called the claims “baseless,” saying 99% of the cobalt in its batteries comes from recycled materials and that it has told suppliers to stop sourcing from the DRC and Rwanda. The case was pending as of early 2026.¹⁵

Separately, the DRC government filed criminal complaints in December 2024 against Apple’s French and Belgian subsidiaries, accusing the company of laundering minerals from conflict zones and using misleading business practices. French and Belgian authorities were assessing the evidence as of late 2024.¹⁶

Regulation Where Litigation Has Failed

While the U.S. courts have closed one door, regulators elsewhere have opened others. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, adopted in 2024, requires large companies to identify and mitigate human rights and environmental harms in their supply chains, with the first compliance deadlines in 2027. The EU’s 2023 Batteries Regulation adds recycled-content requirements and a “battery passport” for supply-chain transparency. Germany, France, and Switzerland have enacted their own national due diligence laws. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act sets targets to reduce dependence on any single country for materials like cobalt through domestic extraction, processing, and recycling by 2030.¹⁷¹⁸

Inside the DRC, the government has moved to formalize artisanal mining. It created the state-owned Entreprise Générale du Cobalt (EGC) in December 2019 with exclusive purchasing rights for artisanal cobalt, alongside a regulator, ARECOMS, to set prices and audit sites. EGC launched operations in March 2021 through an offtake agreement with the trading house Trafigura. In February 2025, the DRC amended its mining regulations to let industrial operators integrate artisanal miners onto their concessions under supervised standards. A year later, in February 2026, EGC signed a memorandum of understanding with Eurasian Resources Group to formalize artisanal mining on an ERG site in Lualaba Province.¹⁹²⁰²¹

Whether these frameworks will accomplish what Doe v. Apple did not remains unsettled. The U.S. courts held that buying cobalt through a supply chain is not the same as participating in the venture that exploits children. The newer laws take a different tack: rather than asking victims to prove corporate complicity after the fact, they require companies to prevent the harm up front or face penalties for failing to try.

1
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. John Doe 1 v. Apple Inc., No. 21-7135 Opinion
2
International Rights Advocates. IRAdvocates Cobalt Case
3
Class Action. Doe et al. v. Apple Inc. et al. Complaint
4
The Guardian. Apple and Google Named in US Lawsuit Over Congolese Child Cobalt Mining Deaths
5
Amnesty International. This Is What We Die For: Human Rights Abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
6
Corporate Justice Coalition. Cobalt Mining, Child Labour, Corporate Accountability
7
NPR. Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
8
CBS News. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, Dell Sued Over Cobalt Mining Children in Congo
9
SEC. Tesla, Inc. Shareholder Proxy Filing
10
Justia. John Doe 1 v. Apple Inc., No. 21-7135
11
FindLaw. Doe v. Apple Inc., No. 21-7135
12
NYU Law Review. Closing the Accountability Gap Under the TVPRA
13
International Rights Advocates. International Rights Advocates v. Apple Inc.
14
Reuters. US Group Sues Apple Over Congo Conflict Minerals
15
Africanews. Apple Sued Over Conflict Minerals Linked to DRC and Rwanda
16
BBC. DRC Files Criminal Complaints Against Apple Subsidiaries
17
Resources for the Future. Corporate Due Diligence, the Auto Industry, and Battery Supply Chains
18
European Commission. European Critical Raw Materials Act
19
World Bank. DRC Artisanal Mining Sector Report
20
NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. The DRC Is Finally Opening a Legal Path for Informal Cobalt Mining
21
Global Mining Review. ERG Africa and Entreprise Générale du Cobalt Sign MOU