Highlights
- A UN-commissioned report reveals catastrophic human rights abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s critical minerals extraction for green technology.
- Over 300,000 children are working in dangerous mining conditions, with systemic exploitation, environmental devastation, and neo-colonial economic structures perpetuating suffering.
- Western clean energy transitions are built on a foundation of child labor, toxic working conditions, and widespread human rights violations in the Global South.
Adeline Auffret O’Neill, PhD Researcher, Aix-Marseille University and Dr. Indira Boutier, Lecturer in Law, Glasgow Caledonian University author a scathing new report (opens in a new tab) commissioned by the United Nations and authored by European legal scholars exposes the devastating human toll of the global energy transition’s dependency on critical minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The 2025 paper, “Human Rights and the Energy Transition: The Case of Critical Minerals in the DRC (opens in a new tab),” warns that the demand for cobalt, coltan, copper, and other strategic metals—used in electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels—is fueling systemic abuse, corruption, environmental devastation, and a de facto “techno colonialism” that enriches global supply chains while destroying Congolese lives.
Despite holding more than half of the world’s cobalt reserves, the DRC’s mineral wealth has translated not into development, but degradation. Instead of prosperity, the country faces entrenched poverty, violent conflict, child exploitation, and rampant pollution. The report calls this the “resource curse,” where minerals meant to solve the climate crisis entrench neo-colonial economic asymmetries and mass suffering in the Global South.
Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) summarizes key findings in the table below:
| Key Findings | Summary |
|---|---|
| Extraction Without Protection | Artisanal miners, including children as young as seven, dig by hand in dangerous tunnels up to 30 meters deep. Miners face chronic exposure to toxic metals like arsenic, lead, and manganese, resulting in irreversible lung damage, skin disease, developmental delays, and cancer. Formal protections are almost nonexistent. |
| A Lawless Landscape | While the DRC has strong mining and labor laws on paper, enforcement is virtually absent. Artisanal miners operate in a grey zone outside of government oversight, often subject to extortion, violent evictions, and exploitation by corrupt cooperatives or armed militias. The Congolese military itself has been implicated in illegal operations and collusion with warlords. |
| Child Labor as Industry Backbone | UNICEF estimates that over 300,000 children are working in Congo’s mines, particularly in Lualaba and Haut-Katanga. Despite international bans and traceability schemes, cobalt sourced from these regions flows seamlessly into global tech and automotive supply chains via laundering hubs in Rwanda and the Gulf States. |
| Gendered Abuse and Economic Erasure | Women, who make up over 40% of the artisanal mining workforce, are paid pennies for dangerous labor, such as washing ore in toxic sludge without protective gear. Sexual violence and harassment are widespread, especially in conflict zones. Civil society efforts like RENAFEM and Kaza Moyo are attempting to organize and empower women miners—but remain underfunded and unsupported by Western stakeholders who benefit from the minerals they help extract. |
| Environmental Collapse | Massive deforestation, poisoned waterways, and radioactive residue contaminate agricultural land and kill off local biodiversity. Entire communities have been displaced with no compensation. Indigenous peoples—such as Pygmy groups—face cultural extinction as their sacred sites are mined or paved over in the name of “green” progress. |
| Regulatory Theatre, Not Reform | Corporate due diligence laws in the EU and U.S. (like Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act) have failed to stop conflict minerals from flooding the market. The report criticizes these frameworks as “cosmetic compliance”—focused on documentation and PR rather than real human rights outcomes. The authors argue that voluntary ESG reporting cannot substitute for binding, enforced obligations with legal consequences. |
| Global Hypocrisy | Western governments and corporations are simultaneously subsidizing clean energy rollouts at home while ignoring—or directly enabling—human catastrophe abroad. China, meanwhile, dominates the refining and midstream supply chain, reinforcing both economic dependency and human rights neglect. |
Implications for the U.S. Defense and Green Tech Sectors
This report is a direct challenge to the moral and strategic foundations of Western energy policy. If critical minerals are indeed “the new oil,” then the Congo is the new Middle East—except with far less governance and far more exploitation.
For the United States and allied industrial democracies seeking to build resilient, ethical supply chains, this report demands a shift away from upstream-only solutions and into full-lifecycle accountability. That includes:
- Onshoring or ally-shoring processing and refining.
- Funding independent mine-site audits in high-risk jurisdictions.
- Banning imports of minerals linked to child labor, regardless of laundering via third countries.
- Supporting local capacity-building for community-based land tenure and labor protections.
- Creating enforceable consequences for corporations that violate human rights abroad.
Final Thoughts–REEx
The authors offer no easy solutions. But the message is unequivocal: without transformative reform, the global green transition will rest on a mountain of Congolese suffering. A just energy future cannot be built with cobalt mined by children or coltan soaked in blood. The Western world must reconcile its climate ambitions with its ethical obligations before history repeats itself in lithium fields, cobalt pits, and rare earth trenches across the Global South.
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