美最高法院终结《外国人侵权法》下企业人权诉讼

This is [music] Bloomberg Law with June Grasso from Bloomberg Radio.

This term the Supreme Court has already decided more cases split down ideological lines than in the entire previous term. And on Tuesday the court handed down five decisions. Four were by six to three votes with the conservative Republican appointees in the majority and the liberal Democratic appointees in dissent. These included rulings that basically went against the religious rights of inmates, against the rights of green card holders reentering the country, against suits for violations of human rights, but in favor of corporations bringing property claims in Cuba.

Focusing now on one of those decisions, the court's conservatives put new limits on lawsuits alleging human rights violations against corporations over atrocities abroad, effectively putting an end to these suits over human rights abuses. In a six to three vote the court granted tech giant Cisco's bid to shut down a lawsuit alleging that the company worked closely with China to create the country's golden shield surveillance system, which allowed officials to identify, apprehend, and torture members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China.

Cisco has denied allegations of wrongdoing. My guest is an expert in international law, Curtis Bradley, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Tell us about this lawsuit by 12 Chinese nationals and one US citizen suing Cisco.

So, the Cisco case was a suit brought by the Falun Gong religious group from China, at least a number of members of that organization. They were suing not China in this case, but Cisco Systems, the computer company in the United States. And their argument was that Cisco had aided and abetted persecution of the Falun Gong in China by supplying Chinese government with surveillance technology, basically. And the lower court had allowed this case to go forward, and the Supreme Court said that it could not go forward.

And they issued a pretty important ruling about this type of human rights litigation, which has been pretty active for the last 30 years. And the court's decision in Cisco, I think largely is going to put an end to these human rights cases brought against corporations.

Was the issue whether the Alien Tort Statute creates liability for corporations that aid and abet human rights abuse?

Yeah, the case is based on this old statute called the Alien Tort Statute. It's actually been on the books for, you know, since the beginning of the country, 1789. But it has just been uh used for human rights litigation really during the last 30 or 40 years. And what the court held in the Cisco case was effectively it cannot be used for human rights claims. Is you know, one way to translate the decision. They basically said the statute doesn't have enough indication in it that Congress has wanted these human rights cases to go forward.

So, unless Congress amends the statute, the court is really putting an end to those cases. Uh it did say that the statute could be used for a few personal injury type claims that would have been around in the 1780s, but they're not ones that we ever see today anymore. So, this Cisco case basically says Congress will have to provide a new statute if plaintiffs are going to be able to sue for human rights abuses occurring in various countries.

And that's that's an important ruling because there've been many cases for human rights abuses brought for atrocities from around the world, and they've been brought into US courts under this old alien tort statute. And the Supreme Court had imposed a variety of restrictions on that litigation really in the last uh 15 years or so. But this is a more dramatic limit because it effectively just ends any more alien tort statute litigation, I think.

So, the alien tort statute is only 33 words. I'm going to read it. The district court shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. So, if this is a court, you know, that's reading the statute and ruling according to the words, why doesn't that cover what's happening here?

Well, a couple of thoughts. One of the thing the court notes is that um until the 1980s, no one thought the statute provided a cause of action, a claim for human rights abuses. And the words that you just read are not really written in terms of a claim statute. All they say is that the courts have jurisdiction. That is that they're available to hear certain kinds of tort cases, but they don't really provide what we today would call cause of action.

That is a right to seek damages or other relief. And at least in the modern era, courts wait until Congress provides an actual claim statute before it starts giving people the right to sue for damages. But in the alien tort statute cases, courts had been allowing suits for damages even though I don't think the statute really uh addresses that. And the other thing the court mentions is that suits for, you know, these torts around the world inherently raise foreign policy issues.

Sometimes they might promote some good in terms of human rights improvement, but they also sometimes create lots of conflicts with other countries. And the court thought that if Congress really wants that type of litigation, it needs to address those foreign policy issues more specifically. And just citing a statute from 1789 doesn't really show Congress has addressed all the foreign policy trade-offs the human rights cases pose today.

And so effectively the court's just pushing this over to Congress.

The three liberals were in dissent. Justice Sotomayor said, "The court's decision today is yet another notch in its belt unabashedly remaking the law in its preferred image. And the majority jettisons two decades of settled precedent and breathes new life into two decades of rejected legal theories." I mean, only 20 years ago the Supreme Court held the opposite of what the court's holding here.

That is sort of true. There's a 2004 decision that's called Sosa versus Alvarez-Machain. And Sotomayor's dissent certainly understandably emphasizes that decision because the court there did allow at least some cases to continue proceeding under the Alien Tort Statute. Now, it was a pretty limited holding in Sosa. And the court said this should never be a particularly robust set of cases and it suggested a variety of limits the court should consider.

And since that 2004 decision, the Supreme Court has never found a case to satisfy those limits from that 2004 case. And so the majority in the Cisco case says we should just be clear that we're just not going to find a case that satisfies those strict limitations and just let everyone know so they don't waste time litigating because repeatedly the court has found reasons to reject those claims. And now it's just doing so more categorically.

But I think the dissent makes a reasonable point that the court's not really giving precedential effect to that 2004 case. My own view by the way, you know, what people disagree about this is that the 2004 case was probably wrongly decided and I think the majority believes that to be the case as well. But nevertheless, there's an argument that it was entitled to some presidential weight that the court is not giving it.

And I mean, the court has been narrowing the alien The Roberts Court has been narrowing the Alien Tort Statute over the years. And I remember the 2021 decision where a lawsuit accused Cargill and a Nestle subsidiary of knowingly perpetuating slavery of children on the Ivory Coast. And the court said there's no cause of action there, either. If there's no cause of action, then I mean, these people have no place else to sue, right?

Well, that is, you know, one of the concerns about some of these restrictive decisions. But uh the Nestle case you mentioned and some others like it, what the court had been saying was that I would not a

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