Akhmad, et.al v Bumble Bee Foods: Corporate Accountability for Forced Labour in High Seas Fisheries – Preliminary Observations

[Dita Liliansa is a PhD Researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia]

In 2020, Akhmad accepted what he believed to be a fishing job at $300 a month. Once at sea, the promised opportunity became a cycle of abuse. He worked 18-hour days, was beaten with a metal hook, and when a snapped rope tore his leg open to the bone, the captain forced him to continue working even as his boot filled with blood. When he begged to go home, the captain said, “if you want to go home, you can swim in the ocean.” His release came only after he got word to his wife, who then contacted the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union, Serikat Buruh Migran Indonesia (SBMI), prompting intervention when the vessel docked in Fiji in March 2023.

On 12 March 2025, together with three other Indonesian migrant fishers, he went on to file what appears to be the first lawsuit brought against a US company for forced labour in high seas fisheries (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods). He had been abused aboard the Run Da 5, a distant-water fishing vessel flagged to China, operating on the high seas of the South Pacific Ocean. The defendants are not the Chinese shipowner or operator, but the “Bumble Bee Foods,” the US downstream buyer that sourced tuna from the Run Da 5 and two other Chinese-flagged and Chinese-owned vessels, the Lu Rong Yuan Yu 878 and the Lu Rong Yuan Yu 211.

A Jurisdictional Map of Inaction

The Bumble Bee case illustrates the accountability gap that recent scholarship has sought to address. According to the WCPFC Record of Fishing Vessels, all three fishing vessels were flagged to China, owned by Chinese companies, and commanded by Chinese nationals.

Because the abuse occurred on the high seas, where no state exercises sovereignty, China as flag state holds exclusive enforcement jurisdiction over those vessels under Article 92(1) of UNCLOS. It also means that China holds the primary jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the alleged forced labour on board, and bears the primary duty to protect the human rights of everyone aboard those vessels. However, no visible action has been taken against the Chinese shipowners or the Chinese crew members who committed the abuse. Meanwhile, Indonesia, as the state of nationality of the plaintiffs, could in principle report the allegations to China, which would then be legally required to investigate and remedy the situation under Article 94(6) of UNCLOS. However, no such report is known to have been made.

This is where the home state or the state of nationality of the company becomes critical, not only as a regulator of its nationals’ conduct before harm occurs, but as the residual guarantor of access to remedy when flag state frameworks fail to materialise. What makes the Bumble Bee case notable is the plaintiffs’ choice of forum. Despite every connection to the abuse pointing to China—the flag state, the home state of the shipowners, and the state of nationality of the abusers—the victims brought proceedings in a US district court against the downstream American corporate buyer.

On 12 November 2025, the US District Court for the Southern District of California allowed the case to proceed beyond the motion to dismiss stage. The court’s acceptance of jurisdiction is itself significant because it confirms that the commercial relationship between a US importer and a foreign fishing network is sufficient to ground a claim for forced labour occurring on the high seas, aboard vessels otherwise unconnected to the US. Whether that forum will deliver meaningful and structural relief for these plaintiffs, and for the broader network of fishers whose conditions the case has brought to light remains the central question as the litigation proceeds.

Chase the Corporate Beneficiary If You Can

Under 18 U.S.C. § 1595 of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), civil liability extends to any corporation that “knowingly benefits” from “participation in a venture” which they “knew or should have known” was engaged in “forced labour” within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1589. Read together with 18 U.S.C. § 1596, which expressly grants US courts extraterritorial jurisdiction over forced labour offences, the TVPRA reaches conduct occurring on the high seas, which is exactly the jurisdictional space where flag state jurisdiction is exclusive but, as this case illustrates, often inert.

The “participation in a venture” element in the TVPRA similarly mirrors the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) frameworks of “causing,” “contributing to,” and being “directly linked” to harm not only through a company’s own operations but also through their: “business relationships” with other entities in their value chain, which may include suppliers, service providers, contractors, financial partners, or even state actors (UNGPs, Guiding Principles 12-15). Where leverage exists, the company’s responsibility may also deepen (UNGPs, Guiding Principle 19(b)). The “knew or should have known” element arguably embeds a due diligence logic, also reinforced by 19 U.S.C. § 1307 of the Tariff Act, which prohibits importing goods produced wholly or in part by forced labour. Moreover, TVPRA exemplifies the domestic legislation with extraterritorial reach that home states must adopt to operationalise their concurrent prescriptive jurisdiction on the high seas and to fulfill their duty to protect against abuses committed by their nationals.

The UNGPs are an authoritative but soft law instrument, and the plaintiffs understandably do not invoke them in the complaint. Yet in establishing how Bumble Bee meet the elements of 18 U.S.C. § 1595 of the TVPRA, the plaintiffs describe Bumble Bee’s business relationship with FCF—Bumble Bee’s Taiwan-incorporated parent company and primary tuna supplier—as “an integrated partnership” with “shared goals and objectives” and “common work plans” (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 149-150). Central to that relationship was FCF’s operational role as it arranged transshipment services for the fishing vessels within its “trusted network” and provided vessel owners with financing, crew logistics, fuel and bait (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 153-155, 168-169, 172-174). For this purpose, FCF operated more than thirty carriers and twenty tankers that periodically rendezvoused with fishing vessels on the high seas, eliminating any need to call at port (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 177-179, 198-203). The complaint further reveals that all three fishing vessels transhipped exclusively with vessels from FCF’s network (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 205, 210-214). Bumble Bee, in turn, sourced between 95 and 100 percent of its albacore from FCF, co-financed Fishery Improvement Projects, shared executives, and referred to the vessels in FCF’s network as “our fleet” (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 149-151, 156, 168–170, 193, 207).

Having co-financed and coordinated the very infrastructure that kept the plaintiffs captive at sea arguably places Bumble Bee squarely in “contributing to” territory under the UNGPs, though whether it meets all the elements of 18 U.S.C. § 1595 of the TVPRA remains for the court to decide. Equivalent claims could in principle be brought against FCF in Taiwan and the Chinese shipowners in China, provided they have adopted domestic legislation capable of grounding such claims. This also underscores the duty of those states to protect human rights at sea by regulating the extraterritorial conduct of these companies.

Some Preliminary Observations

The Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods case is, at its core, a test of home state extraterritorial jurisdiction. That the case is being litigated at all is a significant contribution to the issue of remedy for forced labour aboard foreign vessels operating beyond any territorial jurisdiction. While it is a landmark case, it also exposes the limits of relying on a single home state. As discussed, FCF and the Chinese shipowners are not defendants in any known proceedings. Their home states have equivalent extraterritorial prescriptive jurisdiction in principle, but without domestic legislation similar to the TVPRA, that jurisdiction remains inert.

The question then becomes what a single home state’s litigation can realistically accomplish on its own, and here the scope of the remedy sought matters. In this case, the plaintiffs seek not only damages, but also injunctive relief that would require Bumble Bee to ban at-sea transshipment, prohibit recruitment fees across its venture network, mandate port calls every three months, and guarantee crew access to grievance mechanisms (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 271-278). If granted, that relief could compel structural reform of the supply chain Bumble Bee controls through its relationship with FCF. Whether such reform would reach beyond Bumble Bee to the broader fishing industry remains to be seen.

There is also a deeper problem: access to remedy for fishers who are still at sea. The plaintiffs were able to seek recourse only after a long period of forced labour. Plaintiff Syafi’I suffered catastrophic burns and was kept aboard for a year, despite three transshipment vessels rendezvousing with his vessel—any one of which could have taken him ashore for medical care (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 139–143). Eventually, the Bumble Bee plaintiffs survived to tell their story and pursue a claim. However, not all do. Akhmad’s case was more the exception than the rule. Deaths and disappearances aboard distant-water vessels have been documented with increasing frequency, and where a fisher does not survive, the prospect of remedy may disappear with them.

Frameworks to remedy nominally exist. The Work in Fishing Convention requires flag states to establish complaints procedures (Article 40) and port states to act on evidence of violations (Article 43). The complaint indicates that the vessels were operating on the high seas of the South Pacific Ocean (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, para. 209), suggesting they likely fished within the WCPFC Convention Area even though the precise coordinates at the time of abuse are unknown, which is a common evidentiary limitation in forced labour cases at sea. The WCPFC obliges flag states to ensure that vessel owners or operators operating in the WCPFC Convention Area immediately mitigate and resolve onboard situations, such as forced labour or other mistreatment (WCPFC Conservation and Management Measure for Crew Labour Standards, paras. 12-15), and China as flag state and Fiji as port state are both WCPFC members. Neither framework, however, applied in this case: the WCPFC measure was adopted in 2024, after the plaintiffs were rescued in March 2023 (Akhmad, et. al v. Bumble Bee Foods, Complaint, paras. 106), and neither China nor Fiji is a party to the Work in Fishing Convention. Indonesia, for its part, ratified the Work in Fishing Convention only in early May 2026, and treaty provisions do not apply retroactively. Moving forward, however, Indonesia’s ratification carries significant weight. As the largest supplier of migrant fishers on distant water fishing vessels, Indonesia will now be legally required to ensure decent working conditions for its fishers aboard both Indonesian and foreign-flagged vessels. In other words, where Indonesian migrant fishers work aboard foreign vessels, Indonesia as their state of nationality could leverage its position to press flag states for reform, including by conditioning deployment on those vessels meeting at least equivalent standards to the Work in Fishing Convention.

Photo attribution: by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash