Supreme Court shields US corporations from foreign human rights lawsuits

WASHINGTON — In a landmark ruling sharply curtailing the extraterritorial reach of federal courts, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6–3 on Tuesday that foreign plaintiffs cannot use federal human rights statutes to sue American corporations for allegedly aiding and abetting abuses committed on foreign soil.
The decision in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe substantially insulates multinational technology firms and defense contractors from domestic civil liability stemming from their commercial ties, hardware shipments, and software deployments to repressive foreign regimes.
Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett held that federal courts lack constitutional authority to craft common-law causes of action under the 1789 Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and concluded that the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (TVPA) does not impose secondary aiding-and-abetting liability. Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
“Today, we close the door that Sosa cracked and hold that courts may not create new causes of action for violations of international norms,” Barrett wrote, referencing the court’s 2004 precedent in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain. “We also hold that the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, which contains an express cause of action, does not provide for aiding-and-abetting liability.”

The underlying lawsuit arose from claims filed by anonymous adherents of Falun Gong, a religious and spiritual movement banned and systematically suppressed by the Chinese government. The plaintiffs alleged they were subjected to mass surveillance, arbitrary detention, forced labor, and severe torture. They argued that this persecution was deliberately enabled and optimized by San Jose-based networking giant Cisco Systems and its executives.
According to the complaint, Cisco engineers customized hardware and developed specialized software modules for China’s nationwide surveillance apparatus, the “Golden Shield” project. The plaintiffs alleged the technology was tailored to track, log, and identify practitioners while knowing the data would facilitate systemic abuse.