By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear an appeal by Cisco Systems in which the tech company and President Donald Trump’s administration are asking the justices to limit the reach of a federal law that has been used to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses committed abroad.
Cisco has appealed a 2023 ruling that breathed new life into a 2011 lawsuit that accused the California-based company of knowingly developing technology that allowed China’s government to surveil and persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Cisco has called the lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages, unfounded and offensive, saying it sold technology to China that is expressly legal under U.S. trade policy.
The lawsuit was premised on the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that had been dormant for nearly two centuries before lawyers began using it in the 1980s to bring international human rights cases in U.S. courts. Cisco, with backing from the Trump administration, is asking the Supreme Court to use the case as an opportunity to limit the reach of the Alien Tort Statute.
The lawsuit also alleged a violation of the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1991 law that allows for the filing of civil suits in U.S. courts against foreign officials who commit torture.
The Falun Gong plaintiffs alleged Cisco executives had facilitated torture on the part of Chinese officials, and therefore could be held liable under both the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act through a legal theory called “aiding and abetting” liability.
A Cisco spokesperson said the company is pleased with the court’s decision to hear the case and looks forward to oral arguments. The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments and rule by the end of June. Paul Hoffman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, combines meditation, slow-motion exercises, moral teachings broadly based on Buddhism and Taoism and leader Li Hongzhi’s sometimes unorthodox theories such as his belief that aliens have started to take over the world. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning U.S. media outlet called The Epoch Times that has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist Party and supports Trump.
The Chinese Communist Party saw the group’s growing popularity as a challenge to its rule and banned it after 10,000 practitioners silently protested in Beijing in 1999, calling it an “evil cult” that threatened national stability, and imprisoned some of its members.
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, sued Cisco in 2011 on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. The lawsuit accused Cisco of designing and implementing the “Golden Shield,” an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist Party to locate and detain Falun Gong practitioners and other dissidents.
The initial plaintiffs included Chinese and U.S. citizens who said they were subjected in China to forced conversion, among other abuses. Some of the plaintiffs said they endured beatings with steel rods, shocking with electric batons, sleep deprivation, and violent force-feeding.
A judge dismissed the case in 2014, saying the alleged conduct did not have a sufficient enough connection to the United States for the case to go forward. The case stalled for many years, in part because of a string of rulings in other Alien Tort Statute cases that made them harder to bring.
In a 2023 ruling, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs plausibly alleged “that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng (crackdown) of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”
In that ruling, the 9th Circuit panel said both aiding and abetting claims could be brought under both statutes invoked by the plaintiffs.
In Friday’s order agreeing to hear Cisco’s appeal, the Supreme Court said it would focus arguments on whether that holding was correct.
The Supreme Court in 2018 ended an Alien Tort Statute lawsuit claiming Jordan-based Arab Bank helped finance militant attacks in Israel and the Palestinian territories. That decision said foreign corporations cannot be sued in American courts for human rights abuses overseas, but left the door open to Alien Tort Statute cases against U.S. companies.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
About the Author
