“There was a little girl who had been given a one-way ticket from a city in the Middle East to India. She was from Kathmandu and had been sent back,” he said, adding the girl, who was about 11-12 years old, rocked and cried continuously in her bed. “She would have been part of the child sex slave trade into the Middle East. It just really strengthened my resolve.”

Forrest amassed his fortune supplying China’s steel mills, after China’s rapid growth ignited a decade-long mining boom in Australia, the world’s biggest shipper of iron ore and coal. He has campaigned to improve Aboriginal employment and education and founded the Australian Children’s Trust in 2001 to help the underprivileged.

‘Sweat Shops’

Global regulators and organizations have been increasing their scrutiny of “conflict minerals,” with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission introducing a rule last year forcing companies such as Apple Inc., Boeing Co. and thousands of other U.S.-listed manufacturers to find out whether their purchases of tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold come from Democratic Republic of Congo mines supporting violent armed groups.

Congo produces about half the world’s cobalt and about 3 percent of its copper and has large deposits of gold, tin, diamonds and coltan, an ore containing the metal tantalum, which is used in consumer electronics. Walk Free will target industrial minerals which are mined from “sweat-shop style” mines in West Africa, Forrest said. Fortescue’s own suppliers had been asked to check their supply chains aren’t inadvertently affected by slavery, though “not everyone could sign immediately” he said.

Mine to Products

“No company can want to knowingly have so-called conflict minerals in its supply chains and products,” Bennett Freeman, senior vice president for sustainability research and policy at Bethesda, Maryland-based Calvert Investment Management Inc., said by phone. “Responsibility goes all the way from mine to the end products.”

Walk Free is involved in several campaigns aimed at getting companies to seek to ensure they use supply chains free of forced labor. It had success with getting Inditex SA, the world’s biggest clothing retailer, to join a pledge concerning the use of cotton picked in Uzbekistan, Forrest said.

Inditex, which is controlled by Amancio Ortega, the world’s fourth-richest person with $54.5 billion, confirmed in an e-mail that it joined the Responsible Sourcing Network’s Cotton Campaign in October, adding it’s been involved with both garments manufacturers and exporters and textile mills associations in a number of countries for some years.

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