Heidi Kingstone is a journalist and author covering human rights issues, conflict and politics. Her most recent book is “Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions.” Slavery is alive and thriving, and it’s wrapped inside shiny chocolate bars that promise to be “fair trade,” “child-labor free” and “sustainable.” In West Africa, which produces more than 60 percent of the world’s cocoa, over 1.5 million children still work under hazardous conditions. Kids, some as young as five, use machetes to crack pods open in their hands, carry loads that weigh more than they do and spray toxic pesticides without protection. Meanwhile, of the roughly 2 million metric tons of cocoa the Ivory Coast produces each year, between 20 percent and 30 percent is grown illegally in protected forests. And satellite data from Global Forest Watch shows an increase in deforestation across key cocoa-growing regions as farmers, desperate for income, push deeper into forest reserves. The bitter truth is that despite decades of pledges, certification schemes and packaging glowing with virtue — of forests saved, farmers empowered and consciences soothed — most chocolate companies have failed to eradicate exploitation from their supply chains. Today, many cocoa farmers in the Ivory Coast and Ghana still earn less than a dollar a day, well below the poverty line. According to a 2024 report by the International Cocoa Initiative, the average farmer earns only 40 percent of a living wage. Put starkly, as the global chocolate market swells close to a $150 billion a year in 2025, the average farmer now receives less than 6 percent of the value of a single chocolate bar, whereas in the 1970s they received more than 50 percent. Then there’s the use of child labor, which is essentially woven into the fabric of this economy, where we have been sold the illusion of progress. From the 2001 Harkin-Engel Protocol — a voluntary agreement to end child labor by the world’s chocolate giants — to today’s glossy environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports, every initiative has promised progress and delivered delay. In 2007, the industry quietly redefined “public certification,” shifting it from a commitment to consumer labeling to a vague pledge to compile statistics on labor conditions. It missed the original 2010 deadline to eliminate child labor, as well as a new target to reduce it by 70 percent by 2020. And that year, a study by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found that hazardous child labor in cocoa production increased from 2008 to 2019. “We covered a story about a ship carrying trafficked children,” recalled journalist Humphrey Hawksley, who first exposed the issue in the BBC documentary called Slavery: A Global Investigation. “The chocolate companies refused to comment and spoke as one industry. That was their rule. Even now, none of them is slave-free,” he added. As it stands, many of the more than 1.5 million West African children working in cocoa production are trafficked from neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali. Traffickers lure them with false promises or outright abduction, offering children as young as 10 either bicycles or small sums to travel to the Ivory Coast. There, they are sold to farmers for as little as $34 each. And once on these farms, they are trapped. They work up to 14 hours a day, sleep in windowless sheds with no clean water or toilets, and most never see the inside of a classroom. Last but not least, we come to deforestation: Since its independence, more than 90 percent of the Ivory Coast’s forests have disappeared due to cocoa farming. In 2024, deforestation accelerated despite corporate commitments to halt it by 2025, as declining soil fertility and stagnant prices pushed farmers farther into the forest to plant new cocoa trees. But as Reuters Correspondent for West and Central Africa Ange Aboa described them, such labels are “the biggest scam of the century!” | Lena Klimkeit/Picture Alliance via Getty Images Certification labels like “Rainforest Alliance” and “Fairtrade” are supposed to prevent this. But as Reuters Correspondent for West and Central Africa Ange Aboa described them, such labels are “the biggest scam of the century!” Complicit in all of this are the financiers and investors who profit. For example, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the world’s largest investor, and Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) is a shareholder in 9,000 corporations, including Nestlé, Mondelez, Hershey, Barry Callebaut and Lindt — all part of the direct chocolate cluster. NBIM also has shares in McDonald’s, Starbucks, Unilever, the Dunkin’ parent company and Tim Hortons — the indirect high-volume buyer cluster. “The richest families in cocoa — the Marses, the Ferreros, the Cargills, the Jacobs — are billionaires thanks to the exploitation of the poorest children on earth,” said journalist and human rights campaigner Fernando Morales-de la Cruz, the founder of Cacao for Change. “And countries like Norway, which claim to be ethical, profit from slavery and child labor.” The problem is, few are asking who picks the cocoa. And though the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, which was adopted last year, requires large companies to address human rights and environmental abuses in their supply chains, critics say the directive’s weaknesses, loopholes, and delayed enforcement will blunt its impact. However, all of this could still be fixed. Currently, a metric ton of cocoa sells for about $5,000 on world markets, but Morales-de la Cruz estimates that a fair farm-gate price would be around $7,500 per metric ton. To that end, he advocates for binding international trade standards that enforce living incomes and transparent pricing, modeled on the World Trade Organization’s compliance mechanisms. “Human rights should be as binding in trade as tariffs,” he insisted. The solution isn’t to buy more “ethical” bars but to demand accountability and support legislation that makes exploitation unprofitable. “We can’t shop our way to justice,” he said. So, as the trees in the Ivory Coast’s forests fall, the profits in Europe and North America continue to soar. And two decades after the industry vowed to end child labor, the cocoa supply chain remains one of the world’s most exploitative and least accountable. Moreover, the European Parliament’s vote on the Omnibus simplification package last month laid bare the corporate control and moral blindness still present in EU policymaking, all behind talk of “cutting red tape.” “Yet Europe’s media and EU-funded NGOs stay silent, talking of competitiveness and green transitions, while ignoring the children who harvest its cocoa, coffee and cotton,” said Morales-de la Cruz. “Europe cannot claim to defend human rights while profiting from exploitation.” However, until the industry pays a fair price and governments enforce real accountability, every bar of chocolate remains an unpaid moral debt.

BRUSSELS — A two-day strike by French air traffic controllers disrupted more than a thousand flights, and airlines are hopping mad over the millions of euros they’ve lost. “I’d be better if I wasn’t canceling 400 flights and 70,000 passengers just because a bunch of French air traffic controllers want to have recreational strikes,” Ryanair’s chief executive officer Michael O’Leary told POLITICO. The walkout “is extremely expensive for us. It costs us millions of euros,” said Benjamin Smith, the CEO of Air France-KLM Group, during a press call. The strike, which took place on Thursday and Friday, was over disputes between two unions and the French directorate general for civil aviation regarding understaffing and the introduction of a new biometric time clock system to monitor air traffic controllers’ work attendance. Airlines are increasingly angry over the frequent French strikes that regularly upend their schedules. “There’s no shortage of air traffic controllers in France. The real issue is that they don’t roster them particularly well,” O’Leary said, adding that the French controllers “are just badly managed.” The strike “is a horrible image for France, for customers at the beginning of the summer vacation season coming into this wonderful country, to be faced with either delayed or canceled flights,” Smith added. “It’s not something that you see in the rest of Europe.” Unions have long complained about structural understaffing of air traffic controllers. Staffing shortages played a role in a near-collision between an easyJet plane and a private jet at the Bordeaux airport in December 2022, according to French investigators. They found that three controllers were working in the tower at the time of the incident instead of the six required by the duty roster. This week’s walkout was called by France’s second-largest air traffic controllers’ union, UNSA-ICNA; it was joined by the USAC-CGT, the third-largest union. According to AFP, some 270 controllers out of 1,400 participated in the strike on Thursday. The airlines also accused France of failing to protect planes flying over the country during these actions, which cause disruption throughout Europe. “It is indefensible that today that I’m canceling flights from Ireland to Italy, from Germany to Spain, from Portugal to Poland,” O’Leary said.  The budget airline chief blamed the European Union, and specifically European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for the situation. O’Leary said that of Ryanair’s 400 cancellations caused by the strike, “360, or 90 percent of those flights, would operate if the Commission protected the overflights as Spain, Italy and Greece do during air traffic control strikes.” “Von der Leyen and the Commission made a big song and dance during Brexit about: ‘We must protect the single market, the single market is sacrosanct, nothing would be allowed to disrupt the single market,’” he said. “Unless you’re a French air traffic controller and you can shut down the sky over France.” “Ursula von der Leyen, being the useless politician that she is, would rather sit in her office in Brussels, pontificating about Palestine or U.S. trade agreements or anything else. Anything but take any effective action to protect the flights of holidaymakers,” O’Leary said after calling for von der Leyen to quit unless she can reform European air traffic control. Von der Leyen is under fire for various actions and even faces a confidence vote in European Parliament next week. The European Commission did not respond to Ryanair’s statement, but transport spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen insisted that air traffic control issues are “on the Commission’s radar.” But “air traffic controlling, per international and EU legislation, it’s the responsibility of member states and countries generally,” she added during a press briefing. “We fully acknowledge the legitimate right of strikes in member states, but it is an issue that is to be addressed more broadly,” Itkonen said, responding to a question on airlines’ requests to overfly countries during strikes.

BRUSSELS — Friedrich Merz’s arrival as German chancellor in May rekindled the fading Franco-German love affair — and the lovebirds have already found a shared interest: killing Europe’s ethical supply chain dream. Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron joined forces this month to hobble new European Union rules aimed at boosting supply chain transparency, agreeing to mutual concessions that critics say have left the bill toothless.  The bilateral deal highlights a new era for the historical Franco-German relationship focused on a sharp pro-business agenda, some argue, thanks to a budding bromance between the two leaders. Adopted last year, the EU’s supply chain oversight law requires companies to police their supply chains for possible environmental and human rights violations. But the bill has yet to be implemented, having been selected as part of a whole set of EU rules currently subject to a massive simplification effort to cut the regulatory burden for businesses.  EU countries on Monday agreed on a dramatically watered-down version of the revolutionary rules in record time. Initially presented by the European Commission in February 2022, the new version — if endorsed by the EU as a whole — will only apply to a fraction of the European companies initially targeted. The new text “is possibly one of the first policy [deliveries] that is going to be restarting the Franco-German alliance,” said Alberto Alemanno, an EU law professor at HEC Paris. Amid escalating trade tensions and geopolitical turmoil, the European Union is on a mission to reinvent itself as a prosperous, pro-business, anti-red tape powerhouse. Macron and Merz are leading the charge in that mission. “It is a first success for the Franco-German couple,” said a French economy ministry official who was granted anonymity in line with the French government’s communication practices after the agreement among EU countries was announced.  That’s because Macron, a staunchly pro-business liberal, and Merz, an equally pro-business conservative, agreed on mutual concessions to make the text more palatable for the two countries, the same official explained. The affinity the two leaders share has not gone unnoticed. “There’s a bit of a honeymoon between Macron and Merz,” Alemanno said. “They really get along well because they have a very similar style of leadership. They are both very charismatic. They also say things that are quite unpopular, but they just say it.”  Last month, Macron told an audience of business executives that the due diligence directive ought “not just to be postponed for one year, but to be put off the table.” Emmanuel Macron told an audience of business executives that the due diligence directive ought “not just to be postponed for one year, but to be put off the table.” | Pool Photo by Benoit Tessier via EPA His comments followed a similar statement from Merz, who had called for a “complete repeal” of the law during a visit to Brussels.  As their leaders were making bold public statements about scrapping the rules altogether, behind the scenes the French and German delegations in Brussels negotiated to effectively hollow out the file. After the agreement was reached, Paris hailed the outcome as a joint win for Europe’s most powerful leaders, while Berlin stayed mum. “The German government will not publicly comment on statements made by other governments or information based on anonymous sources,” a German government spokesperson said. Civil society groups, meanwhile, question whether Europe’s supply chain oversight rules still make a difference. “We’re getting to the point of, is it even worth having this law?” said Richard Gardiner, interim head of EU policy at the ShareAction NGO, arguing that if “badly written” rules are then enshrined in law, companies will have no incentive to do better. A LONG TIME COMING The French and German positions come on the back of a tumultuous start to Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as European Commission president, during which she pledged to answer EU leaders’ calls to cut red tape for business. One of the first concrete measures the new Commission took was an “omnibus” bill, an “unprecedented simplification effort” that watered down several green laws from the previous mandate, including the corporate sustainability reporting directive and the supply chain law. The Commission wanted these changes to be fast-tracked. “I have never seen them move this fast on a piece of legislation,” said ShareActions’s Gardiner, describing the policymaking process in Brussels as having gone from a “technocratic [process] to essentially a personality-based, knee-jerk reaction.” Among the key changes to the rules is the number of companies that will be impacted. While the Commission’s proposal was to exclude 80 percent of European companies from having to comply with both the sustainability reporting and the supply chain rules, EU countries ultimately backed a French proposal to limit the scope of the latter to companies with more than 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in net turnover. In other words, fewer than 1,000 European companies would be subject to them. Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron joined forces this month to hobble new European Union rules aimed at boosting supply chain transparency, agreeing to mutual concessions that critics say have left the bill toothless. | Olivier Hoslet/EPA And that’s what the French wanted. “I think that this alignment between France and Germany allowed [us] to progress,” said the French official quoted above. In particular, the French agreed to concessions on civil liability — a main concern of German companies, which did not want to be liable for breaches of the law at the EU level. In exchange, Berlin agreed to back the higher threshold that determines which companies are subject to the new rules to ensure they align with those that already exist in French law.  On the French side, there was a “prioritization of the topic of the threshold,” said a Parliament official familiar with the details. THE BACKSTORY Berlin especially has long been at the forefront of the political war against the supply chain oversight law, with liberal and conservative politicians turning their opposition into a core component of electoral politics at a time of economic downturn, warnings of de-industrialization and global trade wars.  Even well before the Commission presented its rules, Germany was pressing Brussels to follow its lead and exempt companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. Back in 2022 the bill was already falling short of what progressive lawmakers and green groups were requesting.  After all three EU institutions managed to clinch a deal in December 2023 — overcoming an attempt by center-right European People’s Party (EPP) lawmakers to kill the file, and having already agreed to carve out the financial sector to win France over — the horse-trading intensified. Germany’s liberals, back then the smallest party in the three-party coalition of former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, launched a last-ditch push to kill the heavily lobbied and controversial file altogether, despite major disagreements within the national coalition government. France and Italy both jumped on the bandwagon.  Despite all this, the measure made it through.   Now, the survival of EU supply chain oversight rules is part of the new coalition agreement between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats (SPD) in Berlin. In principle, the agreement binds the German chancellor to protect the bill, albeit with a promise to trim the bureaucratic burden in the text. But tensions are simmering beneath the surface. Now, the survival of EU supply chain oversight rules is part of the new coalition agreement between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats (SPD) in Berlin. | Filip Singer/EPA “Many people would have benefited from the law, but their voices were not loud enough — while the bureaucracy debate overshadowed the debate,” said one German government official, granted anonymity to speak freely about internal political dynamics.  THE FRENCH U-TURN Macron’s position was far less consistent than Merz’s. He performed a spectacular U-turn to become the No. 1 opponent of a text he and his governments had advocated, at least publicly. Having been one of the first countries to enact a national law banning human rights abuses and environmental breaches from supply chains, France initially cast itself as a top supporter of the text and made it a priority when it held the rotating Council presidency back in 2022. Then, last year, Paris piggybacked on Berlin’s opposition, requesting that the law apply to fewer companies. Fast forward to 2025, and the French have become fierce critics of the text. Earlier this year, POLITICO revealed that Paris had asked the European Commission to indefinitely delay the text. That was before Macron told a roomful of business CEOs gathered in Versailles from all over the world that the text should be thrown out altogether.  While the president’s shift is music to the ears of France’s industry lobbies, it has also triggered an internal revolt from his allies who warned against sacrificing green and anti-forced labor rules under pressure from business.  And unlike about a year ago, Berlin and Paris are facing barely any pushback.  Last year, the Greens and the Social Democrats in the former German coalition government voiced their opposition to Berlin’s attempts to kill the bill, before giving in to pressure from the liberals. Now, the Social Democrats co-governing with Merz’ conservative party are mostly quiet. On Wednesday, the SPD-led labor ministry finally broke its silence, saying it was in “favor of reducing the administrative burden on companies and at the same time effectively protecting human rights.” Calls to alleviate the burden for businesses, it seems, have become the new political consensus. “The whole narrative has gotten out of hand. And no one is still up against it,” Gardiner said. Marianne Gros and Antonia Zimmermann reported from Brussels, Giorgio Leali reported from Paris and Laura Hülsemann reported from Berlin.

BRUSSELS ― The Socialists are not just rebelling against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s attempts to water down the EU’s green agenda — they are also out to stop her cutting budget funds for training young people and the unemployed. Von der Leyen, from the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), needs the Socialists as part of a centrist coalition to pass legislation through the European Parliament. It is an ominous signal for her that the center-left is already gearing up to play hardball over the EU’s next budget, or Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). The fight is set to hinge on the social fund — worth €142.7 billion in the 2021-2027 budget — which is supposed to tackle poverty and support vulnerable groups. Von der Leyen wants to see that money channeled more to defense and scaling up industry. “I do not understand an MFF, a community budget, without such an important fund as the European Social Fund,” said Iratxe García Pérez, leader of the Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament during the last plenary session.  “[The Commission] won’t have a blank check from the Socialist group,” she warned, hinting the fund will be a red-line in negotiations. She added to POLITICO: “We need to adapt to new challenges, and competitiveness is part of it, but not at the cost of leaving behind the EU’s social cohesion. Farmers, industry and business also benefit from social spending.” The Socialists, the second-largest group in the European Parliament, accuse the center-right-dominated EU executive of railroading its pro-business and deregulation agenda into the next seven-year budget.  Last week, Socialists and liberals threatened to pull the plug on von der Leyen’s informal pro-EU majority after she controversially sided with the far right in canceling an anti-greenwashing law. Inside the Berlaymont, the Socialist commissioner for social rights Roxana Mînzatu ― who is in charge of the European Social Fund — is fighting a rearguard battle to save it. “I do not understand an MFF, a community budget, without such an important fund as the European Social Fund,” said Iratxe García Pérez. | Ronald Wittek/EPA Mînzatu and her three fellow Socialist commissioners, however, are outnumbered by 14 commissioners from the EPP who are keen to steer the EU’s €1.2 trillion cashpot towards new priorities such as defense and industry.  EU commissioners from all parties are lobbying to secure greater control and funding for their programs ahead of the presentation of the budget proposal on July 16.  SIMPLIFICATION AND ITS CRITICS The Commission intends to lump dozens of funds into a national and regional plan that links payments to the completion of economic reforms.  Supporters say this system will reduce complexity and make it easier for countries to spend the EU’s money.  But critics warn that this is a smokescreen to cut the EU’s funds, and shuffle money away from priorities such as regional development and social cohesion. “The question you have to ask in deliberating any new structure for the MMF is how can the Commission manage, sway or control that governments will spend the EU funds on the right policy priorities, which are not always necessarily the most attractive or [visible]?” said a Commission official. Mînzatu supports attaching a price tag to the social fund in the new budget to compel governments to actually spend the money on social policy.  Inside the European Parliament, the EPP is also in favor of ringfencing specific money pots ― although the center right is more interested in farmers’ subsidies than social programs. “We cannot have farmers competing for funds for highways or modernizing public transport or for making buildings or energy efficiency,” said lawmaker Siegfried Mureșan, the EPP’s point person for the budget talks.  “The social fund will be defended by the European Parliament,” he added.

All 27 European Union member countries have agreed to push for radical cuts to ethical supply chain rules, setting the stage for tense negotiations with other EU institutions later this year. It continues a growing trend of cutting back environmental laws to reduce the regulatory burden on business and boost the bloc’s sluggish economy. On Monday evening, EU ambassadors endorsed the Council of the EU’s position on the first omnibus simplification bill, a proposal for sweeping cuts to EU green rules that is one of the first major bills of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as European Commission president. Green groups and some European lawmakers already considered the Commission’s original proposal too weak — now, member countries want it to be even laxer. The Council’s final position adopts a French proposal to just ask companies with more than 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in net turnover to police their supply chains for environmental and human rights abuses. The threshold on the current proposal is 1,000 employees and turnover of €450 million. If endorsed by the EU as a whole, this would mean that fewer than 1,000 European companies would be subject to the law, called the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. EU countries in the Council also agreed that companies should only have to assess their direct suppliers — and not their entire supply chain, as originally stipulated. They also want to postpone the deadline by which EU countries must transpose the directive into national law by a year. Denmark, which will take on the presidency of the Council of the EU in July, will run negotiations with the European Parliament and Commission on this. It comes just days after the Commission announced it would kill anti-greenwashing legislation days before negotiations on the law with Parliament and Council were due to conclude, causing uproar among some groups in Parliament.

LONDON — Western governments should create a “strike fund” to support a wave of industrial action across Iran that will paralyze the state and hasten the end of the regime, according to the son of the country’s former leader.  Reza Pahlavi, whose father was the last shah of Iran and was ousted in the 1979 revolution, believes Donald Trump’s nuclear talks with Tehran will fail to deliver peace in the region. But he sees a chance for America and Europe to help the country’s grassroots opposition to overthrow its clerical rulers from within.  In recent years, anger at the regime’s repression and economic mismanagement have boiled over in unusually large public protests. Tehran’s standing across the Middle East has also been heavily dented by the fall of its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and by Israel’s devastating strikes against Hamas and Hezbollah. With Iran on the back foot, Pahlavi saw an opportunity for Western powers to intensify support for the regime’s opponents and potential defectors. In an interview with POLITICO, he called for cash to be released to help people engage in peaceful civil resistance, with a series of “organized labor strikes that could paralyze the system and force it to collapse.”  Such a “strike fund” could be drawn from frozen Iranian assets, he said. “Paralyzing the regime as a result of work stoppages and strikes — which is the least cost to the nation provided we can fund it — this is something that can happen in a matter of months.”  The specter of mass strikes is a potent one in the context of Iran’s revolutionary history. Months of strikes — especially by oil workers — were critical in piling extreme pressure on the shah. After the revolution the Islamist regime suppressed the labor movement, but it has reemerged as a potential political factor, and Tehran was taken aback by the scale of action by petrochemical workers in 2021.   Pahlavi, 64, has been touring European capitals talking to government ministers and officials, as well as to private sector investors, to press the case for stepping up assistance for internal dissent. The other option, he fears, will be external action including potential military strikes from the United States or Israel.  “Diplomacy has been exhausted with no actual breakthrough, and at the same time, there’s a concern that if diplomacy fails are we talking about military action?” Pahlavi said. “What we propose is a third way — the best way to avoid having to resort to that scenario. Give the people of Iran a chance, let them be the agent of change, before we have to resort to other measures that are not wanted.”  NUCLEAR DEADLINE His intervention comes at a critical moment, with the fate of Iran in the balance.  Trump has authorized direct talks between American and Iranian officials while threatening military action if Tehran does not scale back its nuclear program quickly enough.  At the same time Iran is widely blamed for stirring conflict across the Middle East and beyond, with its long-held policy of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and supplying Vladimir Putin’s military with drones for attacks on Ukraine.  Tehran’s standing across the Middle East has also been heavily dented by the fall of its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and by Israel’s devastating strikes against Hamas and Hezbollah. | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images Pahlavi regards Trump’s team as crucial allies who are clear about the threat posed by Tehran.  But he believes the United States-led talks on a nuclear deal are doomed. “This regime does not negotiate in good faith,” he said recently. “However well-intentioned, these nuclear talks will throw a lifeline to a crumbling dictatorship and prolong its export of terror and chaos.”  Time is running short. While Trump reportedly blocked Israel’s push for more military strikes against Iran, he set a deadline of mid-May for clear progress on nuclear talks.  Pahlavi believes Tehran will use the talks to play for time and that the West should focus instead on backing internal opposition.  Raiding Iran’s foreign-held assets frozen under international sanctions — worth an estimated $100 billion — could also finance a surge in technological supplies to enable the protesters, dissidents and potential defectors from the regime to communicate and organize among themselves, Pahlavi said.  MORE STARLINK While the authorities in Iran have persecuted dissent online, Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals providing uncensored internet access are already operating after being smuggled into the country, often at great personal risk to those involved. In recent months the number of Starlink users has increased significantly, and that influx of communications technology needs to continue, Pahlavi said.  “Now there are means to load a particular app on your smartphone that directly links your phone to a satellite without even the need to access the terminals,” he said. Western help needs to focus on “flooding the market with these components — it’s a matter of scaling it and having enough of those smuggled in.”  Regime change has earned a bad name, thanks to the U.S.-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq under President George W. Bush.  Pahlavi’s view is that many of those currently working under poor conditions for the Tehran regime will need to stay in place to help rebuild the country once the ayatollahs are ousted.  While he insisted he was “not interested in power or a post,” he said he would play a role as interim leader to establish a new democratic constitution. “I’m not here to run for office but I have a critical role to play as a person people call upon because they trust me,” he said. “Today’s generation sees that as an element that could be a broker, an agent of change, a leader of transition that can appeal well above the political divisions to a sentiment of national unity.”  OTHER VOICES Pahlavi still stirs skepticism among Iranians, even if he is promising to act solely as a facilitator of change, who will then step aside after seeking to unite the country’s highly splintered opposition camps. While monarchist chants and symbols have popped up at demonstrations in Iran, other pro-democracy protesters have adopted the slogan that they want “neither a shah, nor a [supreme] leader.” Memories of the out-of-touch elites of the shah’s era and his feared SAVAK secret police run deep. Iran is widely blamed for stirring conflict across the Middle East and beyond, with its long-held policy of supporting Hamas and Hezbollah and supplying Vladimir Putin’s military with drones for attacks on Ukraine. | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images Fundamentally, it is unclear whether any of Iran’s opposition abroad can prove a major force in overthrowing the regime, or whether more significant changes would be more likely to come from rivalries and fractures inside the current state apparatus. Indeed, according to Sanam Vakil at the Chatham House think tank in London, there are big questions over whether the Iranian people are as close to ousting the regime as Pahlavi suggests. She argues that even if they are, he should not be thought of as the inevitable interim leader-in-waiting.   “His father was ousted for all sorts of reasons. Why are we going to put our money on the son that literally has done nothing in the 46 years since he left Iran?” she said. “It’s important to support Iranian agency. There are so many courageous visionaries inside the country and inside Evin Prison who are highly qualified but treated abhorrently by the Islamic Republic — many Nobel Prize winners, many human rights defenders. We should put money on them.” For his part, Pahlavi insists he wants a new constitution with three pillars at its core: preserving Iran’s territorial integrity; creating a secular democracy separating religion from government; and enshrining “every principle of human rights,” including protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexuality, religion or ethnic background.  As soon as a referendum is held to ratify these new arrangements, he said, he would step back again. “That’s the end of my mission in life.” 

OPTICS ABANDONED AND NOWHERE TO GO: A SNAPSHOT OF MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS STRANDED IN LEBANON War is a magnifier of the best and worst of human behavior, and it’s often those already vulnerable who suffer most. Text and photos by HEIDI PETT in Beirut, Lebanon Heidi Pett is a freelance journalist. Her work in radio, print and television has been featured in publications like the Economist, the BBC and Sky News UK. In an old Chevrolet factory building on the edge of Beirut’s southern suburbs, nearly 200 women from Sierra Leone lined up for lunch. The night before, airstrikes had rattled the windows, echoing round the cavernous space. But now, in the daylight, laughter and chatter bounced off the walls. It was early October, it was hot inside, and as sweat beaded on their foreheads, the women walked slowly, scuffing their plastic slides on the concrete floor.  They were some of the 176,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon — many of them separated from or abandoned by their employers who fled Israel’s aerial and ground assaults on the country. War is a magnifier of the best and worst of human behavior, and it’s often those already vulnerable who suffer most. “The madam, she left me at the roadside,” said Patricia Sellu. Advertisement In late September, an Israeli airstrike had targeted the house next to where Patricia was a live-in domestic worker. She was sweeping outside, on the opposite side of the home, which shielded her from the blast’s direct impact. Still, she was enveloped by the sound, the falling debris and the choking black smoke. Both houses were on fire, and she didn’t have a chance to grab her phone, clothes or the wages she’d been hoping to send back home to pay for her children’s school.   Out of confusion — or a lack of care — the family she was working for left without her. She had no way of contacting them. And as the village neighbors drove past without stopping or slowing, she had no idea how to get to safety, or which way to go. She wasn’t even sure exactly where she was. Having fled her previous workplace because the husband was sexually assaulting her — not that she had permission to leave — she’d only been with this family for a few weeks, and the agency that brought her to Lebanon hadn’t told her the name of the village. All Patricia knew was that it was a long journey to Beirut in the army truck that eventually picked her up. They dropped her in Sabra, a Palestinian refugee camp in the capital, where she found other live-in domestic workers from Ethiopia, the Philippines and Sierra Leone. These workers came to Lebanon under the kafala sponsorship system. Their residency and work rights are bound to a specific employer, and they aren’t covered by the country’s labor laws, which leaves them vulnerable to abuse and conditions that amount to slavery. Those who attempt to leave their designated sponsor are subject to detention and deportation, and it’s common for employers to withhold passports and wages. “I just want to go to my country,” Patricia said. “The struggle is too much for us. Lebanon is not our country, we just came here to make our living, so when this happened, we didn’t have anywhere to go.” The expansion of Israel’s bombing campaign and the ground invasion that followed caused more than a quarter of Lebanon’s population to flee their homes. Only Lebanese citizens were allowed in government shelters, which were already at capacity. So, Patricia and the other women she met in Sabra made their way to one of Beirut’s beaches where they slept in the open for four days before hearing about a makeshift shelter welcoming migrant workers. In peacetime, the old factory building was an events space used for parties, exhibitions and photo shoots, and jewelry designer Déa Hage-Chahine used to hold parties there. Déa had started supporting migrant workers four years ago, when the impact of Lebanon’s financial crash, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 port explosion meant many families could no longer afford to employ domestic workers and just dumped them. At that stage she was mostly just fundraising. However, when the war caused a second, much larger wave of abandonments, also displacing migrant workers who had been living in shared apartments in Dahieh, which were subject to an intensive Israeli bombing campaign until the cease-fire, she took action. Déa sought permission to host the women in the empty building, and has since spent her days sourcing mattresses, food, clothes and medicine for the rapidly expanding number of women she became responsible for.  Each time I visited, the volunteers would have transformed the shelter in some way, whether constructing furniture from discarded pallets, walling off a storage area, or bringing in cots for the five small children there. For the first few days, they fed the women with ready-meals delivered by one of the many volunteer groups supporting Lebanon’s displaced. But soon, they had a kitchen up and running, and assigned the women into groups responsible for cooking meals. It gave them back some agency and dignity — able to choose what they ate, cook familiar meals and pass the time.  The volunteers — mostly young women from a loose group of friends — would take turns on shifts as well, doling out medicine, settling small arguments over phone chargers and food. They weren’t acting in any official capacity. They were simply young Lebanese who took on an enormous responsibility, working in solidarity with a community that had fallen through the cracks. Advertisement One day, signs appeared by the kitchen, trying to confirm reports about a young woman from Sierra Leona who was killed in an airstrike in the Beirut suburb of Dahieh. Her name hadn’t been recorded on any official lists. Over the next two days, the volunteers then registered all the women at the shelter and asked whether they’d like to return to Sierra Leone or stay in Lebanon and attempt to find new jobs and a more permanent place to stay. Most wanted to go home, but of the 200 women they interviewed, only one had possession of her passport. Nena Ghajar was among the many who didn’t. Her employers had fled the country and took her papers. “I said ‘Madam, please give me my documents,’ and she said, ‘No, I paid a lot of money to bring you here, so I will not give you your passport unless you finish your contract.” Nena told me she was willing to finish the contract but wondered how she was supposed to do that given the family had left Lebanon, and she had no way of contacting them. She had cooked, cleaned and looked after the family’s children and grandchildren for 18 months, saving the money to send back home to cover the school fees for her own four kids. “The madam didn’t look back, only the little children. The little one, the 2-year-old was crying, saying ‘Nena, yalla let’s go,’ and I had to tell her I couldn’t go with her because I don’t have a ticket and visa.” When the family left for the airport, they locked the door behind them, leaving Nena homeless. She couldn’t go back even if she wanted to — the house was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike shortly after. But when we first spoke, Nena still wanted to stay in Lebanon and find another job; she hadn’t yet made enough to cover her children’s schooling. Thankfully, while the Lebanese state struggled to support its own citizens during the most intense period of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, immigration authorities agreed to waive fines and fees for women who wanted to leave but had lost their documents or changed employers. And while Déa and her team worked entirely on their own, they set up online fundraisers to cover costs of food, water deliveries, fuel, medicine and, eventually, flights home. It was three weeks later that the shelter started receiving visits from groups like Médecins Sans Frontières, or got word that the International Office for Migration would cover the cost of a repatriation flight. On the day Déa announced this, the women broke out into riotous singing. Some cried as they belted out the chorus of “When Shall I See My Home?” a Nigerian folk song that had become an unofficial anthem of the shelter. The women weren’t able to return with much, though — those on the first repatriation flight were allowed just a 10-kilogram bag. After years of hard work and hardship, many left Lebanon with less than what they arrived with. In January, two months after the cease-fire was announced, only 30 women remained at the shelter. The volunteers now plan to close it after the final repatriation flights. However, they’ve found apartments and are covering rent for those who stayed but are still looking for work, as well as the cost of medical treatment and surgery for those too ill or injured to travel.  Meanwhile, the women who made it home are relieved and elated. In the voice note she left me after landing in Sierra Leona, Nena’s voice cracked with tears: “I’m so glad. I’m so very, very happy now I’m back in my country.” Advertisement

BRUSSELS — A law setting rules on how truckers operate set off an east-west battle between European Union member countries and laid bare a profound conflict at the heart of the bloc’s internal market. On Friday, the EU’s highest court will decide who’s in the right. The Court of Justice of the EU is delivering a long-awaited ruling on 15 overlapping legal challenges targeting a collection of reforms known as the Mobility Package. The reforms aimed to improve truck drivers’ lives and tackle unfair competition practices with new rules on driver rest times, their right to local salary levels and their ability to circulate within other countries to carry out deliveries. The package was viewed very differently depending on which part of the EU was doing the looking. For many West European countries, it was a strategy to prevent the EU’s free movement from undermining worker rights. Many Central Europeans, in contrast, saw it as an effort to protect western trucking companies at the expense of shipping firms from new member countries. Seven EU members sued; many more intervened in court. Rarely has a law “given rise to such a grouped and intense contentious reaction at EU level,” a top court adviser, Advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella, noted in his November opinion. He warned that the debate raises “the risk of a split between two visions of the European Union … on an issue that is fundamental to the internal market.” In his opinion, Pitruzzella suggested ditching an obligation to regularly return trucks to their registered base — something welcomed by Lithuania and Malta.  But French, German and Nordic industry groups argued the advocate general didn’t find fault with the content of the measure and warned that scrapping it would “open the door to more social dumping and nomadic driving in Europe.” Now — four years after the package’s adoption and more than seven years after it was first proposed — the court gets a say. It’s under no obligation to echo an advocate general’s opinion, but it often does. A little refresher may be in order. Here’s what you need to know. 1. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? The Mobility Package includes several reforms to improve truckers’ — undeniably tough — working conditions. The new measures banned drivers from taking long rests in their cabins and mandated their regular return home. It also introduced new restrictions on pickups and drop-offs within other EU countries, known as cabotage. The most controversial measure demands that trucks return to their company’s registered base at least once every eight weeks.  That was an effort to prevent so-called letterbox companies from registering in low-cost countries despite operating on a near-permanent basis on the other side of the Continent. But on the bloc’s periphery, that was seen as a protectionist measure to cut them out of the internal market and saddle their transport sectors with millions in added costs. Even the European Commission questioned the measure after its adoption, eliciting fresh outrage from negotiators. Now-outgoing Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean went as far as preparing plans to scrap it. 2. WHY IT MATTERS Trucks carrying goods from one country to the next will typically combine that international delivery with other deliveries along the way to bring down costs and avoid empty runs. But when foreign truckers pick up and deliver goods within another country, they’re also doing a transport job that could have been carried out by a local company. As a result, the debate about the mistreatment and unequal remuneration standards of truck drivers has become intertwined with discussions about unfair competition. 3. WHY IT WAS SO POLITICALLY DIVISIVE In EU lawmaking, negotiators’ positions can often be traced back to their political affiliation or the European Parliament’s typically more ambitious stance. But in the long-running talks on the Mobility Package, Council of the EU and Parliament negotiators — and even commissioners — split along geographic lines. It took negotiators years to find a carefully crafted deal that passed muster with enough countries. Take one piece of the puzzle out and the whole thing could come crashing down, they have warned. 4. WHO’S INVOLVED? Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta and Poland lodged a total of 15 challenges with the court. Estonia and Latvia, the two other countries which voted against the package, added their support to some of those challenges. Belgium backed Malta in its challenge of one measure. Other countries, including Germany, Italy, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and Austria, banded together in a France-led “road alliance” and turned to the court in defense of the legislation. 5. IT’S BIGGER THAN TRANSPORT Countries supporting the package called for measures to improve truckers’ work conditions, framing it as an effort to halt a broader “race to the bottom” across the sector. Their warnings centered on worries that the bloc’s free-movement rules could harm social rights and erode support for the EU. They argued that cheaper workers moving from poorer EU countries undermine the working conditions of their own drivers. But countries questioning the reform saw that as protectionism. They complained that older EU countries treated the European project’s promise of free competition in a common EU market as something they’d only defend if it was to their advantage. That makes the stakes very high. “Over and above the legal issues at stake, it is therefore also, in a way, the pursuit of a desire to live together on common economic and social foundations that is at stake in these actions,” Pitruzzella cautioned in his opinion.