The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on Tuesday that further restricts the use of the Alien Tort Statute - a nearly 250-year-old federal law - for lawsuits claiming human rights violations abroad. The ruling resolved a long-standing case brought by members of the Falun Gong movement who accused Cisco Systems of helping the Chinese government surveil and persecute practitioners.
The underlying lawsuit, filed in 2011 under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789, alleged that Cisco knowingly developed and implemented technology that allowed Chinese authorities to identify, track and then mistreat Falun Gong adherents. Plaintiffs said the technology was part of an internet surveillance system known as the Golden Shield that was used by the Chinese Communist Party to target dissidents, including members of Falun Gong.
At the heart of the case was a legal question about whether the Alien Tort Statute can be used to impose accomplice liability on corporations - that is, whether companies may be held responsible for "aiding and abetting" international human rights abuses committed outside the United States. The Supreme Court's action overturned a recent decision from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which had revived the suit and permitted it to move into the discovery phase.
In 2023 the 9th Circuit found that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng, or crackdown, of Falun Gong, and that the company did so with awareness that internationally prohibited acts - including torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance and extrajudicial killing - were substantially likely to occur. That ruling allowed the case to proceed past earlier dismissals and toward the evidentiary stage before trial.
But the Supreme Court reversed that revival, reinforcing a line of decisions dating to 2013 and 2018 in which the Court narrowed the circumstances under which the Alien Tort Statute can be invoked against corporations for overseas conduct. Those past rulings emphasized that there must be a significant connection between the alleged misconduct and actions that took place within the United States for an ATS claim to proceed.
The Alien Tort Statute had lain largely unused for nearly two centuries until the 1980s, when lawyers began to rely on it to bring international human rights claims in U.S. courts. Subsequent Supreme Court decisions over the last decade have progressively limited its reach, which has made it harder for plaintiffs to pursue claims against U.S. companies for alleged abuses carried out overseas.
The Cisco litigation previously faced dismissal in 2014, when a federal judge concluded that the alleged conduct lacked a sufficient connection to the United States to move forward. The case remained stalled for years amid evolving Supreme Court precedent that constrained ATS-based claims.
The party representing the plaintiffs in the Cisco matter was the Human Rights Law Foundation, a Washington nonprofit that filed the suit on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. Cisco, based in San Jose, California, strongly rejected the allegations, calling them unfounded and offensive. The presidency of Donald Trump, at the time, filed a brief siding with Cisco in the litigation.
The Supreme Court's 2021 decision in a separate case involving allegations against Cargill Inc and a Nestle SA subsidiary set a related precedent when it dismissed a claim that the companies knowingly perpetuated slavery on Ivory Coast cocoa farms, ruling that plaintiffs had not shown the relevant conduct occurred within the United States. That decision was among a series of rulings the Court cited in restricting ATS liability for corporations.
Details in the Cisco case cited by the 9th Circuit included allegations that the Golden Shield system enabled Chinese authorities to locate and then inflict mistreatment on Falun Gong members. Falun Gong itself was founded in China in 1992, and the movement was banned by the Chinese government in 1999 after many members gathered at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. The organization has urged followers to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Members of Falun Gong established a U.S.-based media outlet, The Epoch Times, which is described in court materials as right-leaning and strongly critical of the Chinese Communist Party. The legal fight against Cisco has been intertwined with evolving U.S. jurisprudence about the extraterritorial reach of federal statutes and the circumstances under which U.S. courts can adjudicate alleged human rights violations committed abroad.
With the Supreme Court's reversal of the 9th Circuit, the Cisco suit will not proceed to the discovery phase as the plaintiffs had hoped. The ruling continues the Court's trend of requiring a clear and substantial connection to the United States before U.S. courts will entertain ATS claims against corporations for foreign human rights abuses.