THE Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that limits the use of a federal law to hold U.S. companies accountable for human rights abuses abroad, dismissing a lawsuit accusing Cisco Systems of helping the Chinese government persecute the Falun Gong movement.
The 6-3 ruling overturned a lower court’s ruling that allowed a lawsuit filed by Falun Gong members in 2011 under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789.
The suit alleged that Cisco knowingly developed technology that allowed the Chinese government to monitor and persecute Falun Gong members.
The Alien Tort Statute was effectively dormant for nearly 200 years before lawyers began using it in the 1980s to bring international cases human rights In some cases, the Cisco lawsuit questioned whether it could be used to hold companies liable if they “aided and abetted” human rights violations through “accomplice liability.”
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The Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit accusing Cisco of contributing to the persecution of Falun Gong in China. (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)
The Falun Gong movement was founded in China in 1992 and was banned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1999, after thousands of the group’s members showed up at the leadership’s central headquarters in Beijing to stage a silent protest. The group called on its members to denounce the CCP and sharply criticized its leadership in China.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett authored the majority opinion supporting Cisco’s argument that the law does not support holding companies responsible for complicity in human rights violations.
“Courts cannot create new rights of action to remedy violations of international law, so there is necessarily no liability for aiding and abetting such violations,” Barrett wrote in the ruling. rejected the requests against Cisco.
The Supreme Court’s decision divided the justices along ideological lines, with the six conservative justices in the majority and the three liberals dissenting.
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The Falun Gong movement criticizes the Chinese Communist Party and its members are persecuted in China. (Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Paul Hoffman, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said he was disappointed with the decision and asked Congress to take action and create a law “so that victims of serious human rights violations perpetrated by American companies can hold these companies accountable in American courts under the Alien Tort Statute.”
Teleprinter Security Last Change Change % CSCO CISCO SYSTEMS INC. 121.53 +1.99 +1.66% Additionally, the Supreme Court issued an 8-1 ruling that a similar law, known as the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, did not allow a group of plaintiffs to move forward with a lawsuit seeking to hold two Cisco executives responsible for allegedly aiding and abetting torture.
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Cisco called the allegations against them baseless and offensive. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The plaintiffs accused Cisco of knowingly designing and implementing the “Golden Shield”, which is a Internet monitoring system used by the CCP to target dissidents, and they say China used this system to hunt down and torture Falun Gong members.
FOX Business has reached out to Cisco for comment. The company called the allegations baseless and offensive.
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The ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which was reversed by the Supreme Court, found that the plaintiffs demonstrated plausible allegations that Cisco provided technical assistance to PCC and allowed it to conduct discovery before a trial. The Supreme Court’s decision dismissed the lawsuit.
Reuters contributed to this report.
