The 19 elderly women allege as troubled teens they were subjected to compulsory labor by Sisters of the Good Shepherd

Nineteen elderly women in the Netherlands on Friday accused an order of Catholic nuns of years of forced labour while locked up in convents, saying they were “abused on industrial scale”.

The case before the Haarlem District Court relates to some 15,000 teenage Dutch girls who were the wards of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd at convents across the country from 1951 to 1979.

The women, now aged between 62 and 91, said as troubled teens they were taken in by the order and put to work, often hours on end, six days a week sewing material sold for profit, grafting in laundries or ironing.

“The Good Shepherd is responsible for the violation of one of the most fundamental human rights known to us: the prohibition of forced labour or…