Norway's Ministry of Finance has sold all of the shares that its $240bn (€187bn) oil fund held in retailer Wal-Mart because of "serious and systematic" abuses of human and labour rights.

The ministry's Council on Ethics recommended selling the Norway Government Pension fund's Wal-Mart stake because of "acts or omissions that constitute an unacceptable risk of the fund contributing to serious or systematic human rights violations, such as murder, torture, deprivation of liberty, forced labor, the worst forms of child labor and other forms of child exploitation."