Supreme Court Puts Curbs on Human-Rights Suits in Cisco Win (1)

A divided US Supreme Court put new limits on lawsuits against companies over atrocities abroad, rejecting a suit accusing Cisco Systems Inc. of complicity in China’s torture of Falun Gong adherents.

The ruling is the latest in a line of Supreme Court decisions to narrow the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that human-rights advocates for years have tried to wield against multinational corporations.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the courts lack power to authorize new categories of claims under the statute. Barrett said the high court would “close the door” opened by a 2004 decision that had said the courts might be able to permit new types of suits alleging violations of international law.

These types of lawsuits “frequently involve heinous and inhumane acts” that “the political branches or other international actors” may be able to address, Barrett wrote. “But we decline to distort the statutory text or the Constitution’s allocation of powers to enlist U.S. courts in that project.”

The conservative supermajority also held that a separate law, the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, doesn’t allow “aiding-and-abetting” liability claims.

The court’s three liberals — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented from the part of the ruling that limited claims under the Alien Tort Statute for alleged violations of international norms. Sotomayor separately also dissented on the court’s move to disallow aiding-and-abetting cases under the torture victims law.

‘Remaking the Law’

“The court’s decision today is yet another notch in its belt, unabashedly remaking the law in its preferred image,” Sotomayor wrote. “The majority jettisons two decades of settled precedent and breathes new life into two decades of rejected legal theories.”

Lawyers in the case and spokespeople for Cisco and the US Justice Department, which backed the company’s stance in the case, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The high court said 12 Chinese nationals and one US citizen can’t sue Cisco for allegedly aiding and abetting the Chinese crackdown on Falun Gong. The high court had previously left open the possibility of aiding-and-abetting lawsuits against American companies.

The 13 people said Cisco worked closely with China to create the country’s “Golden Shield” surveillance system, allowing officials to identify, apprehend and torture Falun Gong believers. The alleged victims said the Chinese government’s actions violated a host of international law norms.

Cisco has denied allegations of wrongdoing, saying it doesn’t customize products to facilitate repression. China declared the Falun Gong spiritual movement illegal in 1999.

The legal clash centered on the Alien Tort Statute, a 33-word statute that gives federal courts jurisdiction to hear suits by non-citizens over some violations of international law. The measure was enacted in part as a reaction to an attack on a French diplomat in Philadelphia.

Cisco said the law applies only in a handful of scenarios that Congress contemplated when it enacted the law, including piracy and attacks on ambassadors. The company urged the high court to categorically preclude aiding-and-abetting suits, arguing that Congress hadn’t authorized that type of liability.

Lawyers for the group suing the company said the Congress when it enacted the Alien Tort Statute intended to include aiding-and-abetting liability for the international law violations covered by the 1789 measure.

The case is Cisco v. Doe, 24-856.

(Updates with additional details from the opinion.)

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