Norway honours human rights defenders while profiting from child labour

Norway presents itself as a champion of peace, human rights and international solidarity. Yet its sovereign wealth fund invests in more than 7,000 companies worldwide, including hundreds of corporations whose operations or supply chains are linked to exploitation and child labour.

The Government Pension Fund Global, with US$ 2.3 trillion in assets, managed by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), gives Norway extraordinary financial influence. That influence carries responsibility for the conditions under which companies produce goods and generate profits.

The issue is not simply investment returns. It is whether public wealth benefits from cruel and exploitative business models that deny children education, health and dignity, and whether Norway uses its shareholder power to prevent and remedy those abuses.

Evidence: the scale and consequences of child labour

The International Labour Organization and UNICEF estimated that approximately 138 million children were in child labour worldwide in 2024. Research by Guilherme Lichand and Sharon Wolf suggests that the number of working children aged 7–14 may be close to 400 million, indicating that conventional estimates may not capture all forms of children’s work.

These figures use different definitions and methods, but both demonstrate the scale of the crisis. Children work in agriculture, including fruits, vegetables, coffee, cocoa and sugar production, as well as mining, manufacturing and other sectors connected to international supply chains.

The burden falls mostly on children in poorer, predominantly non-white communities, while consumers, corporations and investors in wealthier societies benefit from lower production costs. This makes child labour not only a labour-rights issue but also a question of racial and economic injustice.

Martin Luther King Jr., accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on December 10, 1964, spoke of his belief that people everywhere should have “three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”

A child working instead of attending school is denied precisely those opportunities. Norway cannot honour King’s legacy while treating such consequences as external to its investment decisions.

Accountability: Norway’s responsibility

Norway’s responsibility does not depend on proving that every politician, civil servant or investor intended to support child labour. It arises from the foreseeable consequences of public investment and from the state’s ability to influence corporate conduct.

NBIM must demand that companies:

• identify child-labour throughout their supply chains;
• publish meaningful information about it and their responses;
• establish robust traceability and independent monitoring;
• consult affected communities and workers;
• provide effective remedies to children harmed by corporate activity; and
• hold senior executives and boards accountable for failures and complicity

Voluntary promises are insufficient. Companies should not be able to present themselves as ethical leaders without demonstrating that hungry children are not being exploited to produce their goods.

Desmond Tutu warned, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” For Norway, neutrality cannot mean protecting top corporate executives or financial interests while children remain without effective protection. Nor can companies avoid responsibility by attributing abuses solely to suppliers when they benefit from the resulting products and low prices.

The racial consequences also require explicit attention. When public investment benefits from economic arrangements that impose a disproportionate human cost on non-white children, Norway must assess and address that inequality. Calling this state racism describes the discriminatory consequences of the policy, not an allegation that every individual involved holds racist intentions.

Institutional safeguards and political oversight

Responsibility rests with Norway’s political institutions as well as NBIM. They establish the rules governing the fund and must ensure that ethical safeguards are independent, adequately resourced and capable of producing consequences.

In November 2025, a broad parliamentary majority supported a review of the fund’s ethical framework. During that review, the Ethics Council’s ability to recommend companies for observation or exclusion was temporarily suspended under interim arrangements. The Council continued monitoring companies, but its ability to recommend action changed.

The Council’s monitoring and recommendations have not reduced that Norway’s investments benefit from child labour. This raises questions about its authority, resources, political backing and ability to secure meaningful corporate change.

Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, NBIM Chief Executive Nicolai Tangen and Norges Bank Governor Ida Wolden Bache should explain how Norway will ensure that its investments do not continue to benefit from child labour and how affected children can obtain remedies.

Norway’s contributions to international development and United Nations work do not exempt it from scrutiny. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights and relevant special rapporteurs must examine, investigate and denounce Norway.

The role and complicity of Norwegian media

Norwegian media should investigate the human consequences of the country’s investment policies rather than allowing Norway’s human-rights reputation to go largely unchallenged. When news organisations repeat official claims about ethical investment without examining portfolio companies, shareholder decisions and affected communities, they become complicit in concealing the consequences of public investment.

This complicity may be institutional rather than intentional. It can arise through silence, inadequate scrutiny, reliance on official statements, limited reporting on communities outside Norway and failure to follow financial links from Norwegian institutions to abuses abroad. By treating child labour as a distant supply-chain problem instead of a matter connected to Norwegian public wealth, media outlets can help normalise the very system they should be investigating.

Norwegian journalists should examine:

• the hundreds of companies in the fund’s portfolio that use child labour;
• what NBIM knew and when;
• how it voted at shareholder meetings;
• whether its engagement produced measurable improvements;
• whether the Ethics Council had the intention, authority and resources to act;
• which Norwegian politicians and institutions approved or defended the relevant policies; and
• who benefits and who bears the costs.

Independent reporting is essential because investment decisions can make corporate abuses invisible. Public scrutiny should follow the money and test Norway’s human-rights reputation against the conduct of the companies in which it invests. Norwegian media have a public-interest duty to expose, not obscure, the relationship between national prosperity, institutional investment and the exploitation of children.

Specific recommendations

Norway should:

1. Require comprehensive human-rights and child-labour due diligence for all relevant holdings, including indirect and lower-tier suppliers.
2. Publish company-specific information about identified risks, engagement objectives, voting decisions and outcomes, subject to legitimate confidentiality limits.
3. Strengthen the Ethics Council’s independence, authority, resources and ability to recommend observation or exclusion without political interference.
4. Set measurable deadlines for corporate remediation and disclose when companies fail to meet them.
5. Use shareholder resolutions, voting against directors and other governance tools when companies do not address serious abuses.
6. Establish accessible complaint and remedy mechanisms for children and communities affected by portfolio companies.
7. Consider exclusion when engagement fails, abuses are severe or companies refuse transparency and remediation.
8. Require regular parliamentary review of the fund’s human-rights performance, including its racial and distributional impacts.
9. Support international cooperation and independent UN scrutiny of public investment funds linked to corporate human-rights abuses.
10. Ensure that investment policy is consistent with Norway’s Constitution, international commitments to children’s rights, decent work, education and equality.
11. Require Norwegian public-service and publicly funded media to disclose and investigate conflicts of interest, editorial omissions and institutional relationships that may limit scrutiny of the fund’s investments.
12. Support sustained investigative journalism, including reporting from affected communities and collaboration with international journalists and civil-society organisations examining child labour in global supply chains.

These measures would not eliminate child labour alone. Governments, companies, consumers and international institutions all have responsibilities. But Norway’s financial power gives it a particular duty to act, and Norwegian media have a corresponding duty to ensure that this power is not shielded from public scrutiny.

A test of Norway's values

Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Navi Pillay, Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai represent different struggles for equality, accountability and children’s rights. Their legacies raise a direct question: what is the value of honouring defenders of human dignity if investment policy fails to protect children whose labour contributes to corporate profit?

The exploitation of children in global supply chains is not identical to apartheid. But the principle is shared: human dignity must not be sacrificed for economic advantage, and injustice cannot be excused because powerful institutions benefit from it.

A Nobel Peace Prize is an honour. Protecting children is an obligation. Norway must be judged not by its declarations, but by the evidence, safeguards and remedies attached to the wealth it invests—and by whether its media investigate or help conceal the consequences.

Norway must be held accountable for how it invests its wealth—and for whether it uses its financial power to end child labour, or profits from it.

* Fernando Morales-de la Cruz is a Guatemalan journalist and human-rights activist who has spent more than a decade investigating child labour and exploitation in global supply chains and defending every child’s right to education. He is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Lewis Hine Organization and founder of Cartoons For Change.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL.