A recent blog posting on website of the International Vision Collective, dedicated to promoting universal values awareness, tells us of child worker exploitation in the cocoa-growing industry in Ghana and the Ivory Coast by the Hershey Company, the largest American candy producer and a purveyor of many Halloween treats from Almond Joy to Kit-Kat. See, Fair Trade Chocolate Trumps Hershey's this Halloween.

Tulane University Law School’s Payson Center for International Development recently reported on the use of child labor in the cocoa sector in West Africa, citing Hershey as one company that needs to more closely supervise its supply chain.  In response, many NGOs have called upon Hershey to undertake fair trade practices and the abolition of child labor in the cocoa industry. Hershey is alleged to be the only U.S. chocolate manufacturer that has failed to adopt any type of labor certification, i.e., to have their labor practices monitored by an organization that screens for the abuse of labor rights.

In recent months the Yale Law Library has been increasing it collection of materials dealing with global food issues. Examples of books recently added to the collection include: Ensuring Global Food Safety: Exploring Global Harmonization edited by Christine Boisrobert; The New Regulation and Governance of Food: Beyond the Food Crisis by Terry Marsden; and, Food Crises and the WTO: World Trade Forum by Baris Karapinar and Christian Haberli.

A quick search of Labordoc, a bibliographic service of the International Labour Organization (ILO), brought up a report from 1996 entitled, Child labour and cocoa production in West Africa: The case of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana,  and another from 2007, Rooting out child labour from cocoa farms.

                                                                                                                            ---- Daniel Wade

Our very own Zachary D. Kaufman, YLS JD Candidate '09, will be giving a book talk this Friday, April 17, 2009, at 4:00pm, in the Law Library's L3 Periodical Reading Room.  Zach, an Olin Fellow and editor-in-chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review edited After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond with Philip Clark, research fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, and co-founder of Oxford Transitional Justice Research.

In After Genocide, published by Columbia University Press, ". . . leading scholars and practitioners analyze the political, legal, and regional impact of events in post-genocide Rwanda within the broader themes of transitional justice, reconstruction, and reconciliation."

The book includes ". . . chapters from Rwandan academics and practitioners, such as Tom Ndahiro, Solomon Nsabiyera Gasana, and Jean Baptiste Kayigamba—all of whom are also survivors of the 1994 genocide—and draws on their personal experiences. After Genocide constitutes the most comprehensive survey to date of issues related to post-genocide Rwanda and transitional justice."  Read a more complete description of the book.

After Genocide is not on our shelves yet, but it will be very soon!

On a related note, to start researching the domestic law of Rwanda, begin with our Country-by-Country guide.  A nice portal to Rwandan legislation is Lexadin's World Law Guide.  Also, a simple Morris "Call Number" search for Rwanda -- KTD --will return a list of titles that have been assigned to Rwandan law.  Other human rights materials related to Rwanda are found elsewhere in the library collection.  A Morris Subject Heading" search, human rights rwanda, will return more resources cataloged primarily under human rights rather than strictly Rwandan law.