The US Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an appeal by Cisco Systems in which the tech company and US 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 it of knowingly developing technology that allowed China’s government to surveil and persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
The company called the lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages, unfounded and offensive, saying it sold technology to China that is expressly legal under US trade policy.
Photo: AFP
The lawsuit was premised on the Alien Tort Statute, which lawyers use to bring international human rights cases in US courts.
Cisco, with backing from the Trump administration, is asking the court to use the case as an opportunity to limit the reach of the statute.
The lawsuit also alleged a contravention of the Torture Victim Protection Act, which allows for the filing of civil suits in US 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 the statute and the act through “aiding and abetting.”
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.
Falun Gong combines meditation, slow-motion exercises and moral teachings based on Buddhism, Taoism and leader Li Hongzhi’s (李洪志) sometimes unorthodox theories, such as his belief that aliens have started to take over the world.
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 imprisoning some of its members.
The Human Rights Law Foundation sued Cisco in 2011 on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members, accusing the company 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..
In a 2023 ruling, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US 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.”
The panel said aiding and abetting claims could be brought under both statutes invoked by the plaintiffs.
The Supreme Court said it would focus arguments on whether that holding was correct.
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