By Jan Wolfe
April 28 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday confronts a case with broad implications for human rights litigation in American courts, a long-running lawsuit brought by members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement who have accused Cisco Systems of facilitating religious persecution in China.
San Jose, California-based Cisco is urging the Supreme Court to further limit the scope of the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that lets non-U.S. citizens seek damages in American courts for violations of international law. The court in a series of decisions since 2013 has limited the reach of this law, making it more difficult to hold American corporations legally liable for human rights abuses.
The justices will hear arguments in Cisco’s appeal of a 2023 ruling that breathed new life into the 2011 lawsuit, brought under the Alien Tort Statute, that accused the company of knowingly developing technology that allowed China’s government to surveil and persecute Falun Gong members.
President Donald Trump’s administration is siding with Cisco in the case.
The lawsuit accused Cisco of knowingly designing and implementing the “Golden Shield,” an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist Party to target dissidents. The plaintiffs allege that China used the system to track and then torture Falun Gong members.
Cisco has called the allegations unfounded and offensive.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the case and allowed it to move toward discovery, the evidence-gathering phase before a trial.
The Alien Tort Statute 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. The Cisco case poses the question of whether the law creates liability for corporations that “aid and abet” human rights abuses, a form of what is called accomplice liability.
Cisco is arguing that the 9th Circuit overstepped its authority when it interpreted that law as allowing for liability for aiding and abetting.
The decision of whether the Alien Tort Statute allows for liability for aiding and abetting should be up to Congress rather than courts, the Trump administration said in a brief, citing the significant foreign-policy concerns implicated by the law.
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, sued Cisco on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members.
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, the 9th Circuit 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.”
The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of June.
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, was banned by China’s government in 1999 after thousands of members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. The group has called for people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party. 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.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
