A French court has handed down prison sentences to three individuals, including an employer, on charges of human trafficking related to the exploitation of seasonal workers and their accommodation in horrific conditions during the 2023 grape harvest in the Champagne region, AFP reported.

The ruling comes at a time when the wine-producing region is under increased scrutiny due to a separate investigation into the hiring of Ukrainian workers during the same harvest, which was marked by extreme heat and the deaths of four grape pickers.

The victims’ lawyer described the verdict as "historic." The case involved 50 predominantly undocumented seasonal workers from Mali, Mauritania, Côte d'Ivoire, and Senegal.

The court sentenced the director of a vineyard services company named Anavim—a Kyrgyz woman in her 40s—to two years in prison and an additional two years suspended. She denied responsibility for the living conditions and shifted blame onto the other two defendants, who were suspected of hiring the workers.

The two other defendants, both men in their 30s, were each sentenced to one year in prison and two years suspended. All three were found guilty of human trafficking—under French law, this includes recruiting, transporting, housing, or receiving a person for the purpose of exploitation through forced labor, abuse of authority or vulnerability, or for financial gain.

The court in Châlons-en-Champagne ordered the dissolution of the company and imposed a €75,000 fine on the winegrowing cooperative it worked with. The convicted individuals must also pay €4,000 in compensation to each victim.

Maxime Cessieux, the lawyer representing the workers, called the sentence “symbolic.” He stated that this year’s grape harvest will be under close public scrutiny and that no one will be able to claim: “I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I didn’t know who these people were in my vineyards.”

Each year, approximately 120,000 seasonal workers are hired for the manual grape harvest in Champagne, where vineyards cover 34,000 hectares for the production of the iconic sparkling wine. In 2023, four workers died, likely due to heatstroke after laboring in extreme temperatures.