Last Friday a dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court to convict him for eating chocolate. He believes that by eating chocolate he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms on the Ivory Coast.
Teun Van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labor.
“If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and make them do something about the problem,” van de Keuken said.
Ivory Coast, the world’s No. 1 cocoa producer which has been racked by instability since a brief 2002 civil war, is the target of allegations by international rights groups that children are working as slaves on its cocoa plantations.
The man began his attempt to be charged for eating chocolate two years ago, when the Dutch public prosecutor ruled that it was not a case for the courts and that the journalist was not directly involved with the cocoa business.
On Friday, he appealed against the prosecutor’s decision before a court which is expected to rule in April.