Legal News

Alien Tort Act: Righting the World?s Injustice, or an Injustice Itself?

By Ashby Jones

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Today’s piece, by Nathan Koppel, tackles the Alien Tort Claims Act, a one-sentence law enacted in 1789 authorizing foreign nationals to file U.S. civil actions against those who violate “the law of nations.” The law has increasingly been used to sue major companies for alleged complicity in crimes overseas, including torture and murder. Defendants need only to have regular business contacts with the U.S. to be vulnerable to lawsuits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the litigation has proven controversial. Some legal experts claim that opportunistic plaintiffs’ lawyers have seized on the law to enrich themselves. Human-rights lawyers, on the other hand, counter that victims of abuses often can’t obtain justice in foreign courts, making such suits their only recourse.

In one of the most prominent recent cases, Royal Dutch Shell PLC paid $15.5 million in June to settle a lawsuit claiming it was complicit in the Nigerian government’s execution of activists who had protested Shell’s oil production in the country. Shell has denied wrongdoing.

And earlier this year, a New York federal judge allowed claims to move forward alleging that several major multinational companies, including General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., aided and abetted human-rights violations by providing goods and services to South Africa’s apartheid regime. Ford declined to comment. In a statement, GM said the company “opposed apartheid and became a proactive corporate leader in expressing this stand.”

Thomas Niles, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada and Greece who is now the vice chairman of the United States Council for International Business, a pro-business group, says corporations are being used unfairly as a surrogate for foreign governments in these cases. “You can’t sue the government of Nigeria or South Africa because of sovereign immunity, so who are you going to sue? Companies, and they are sued essentially for being” in countries where human-rights violations occur.

But Congress has the authority to rein in alien-tort litigation and hasn’t done so, casting doubt that the litigation impinges on diplomatic interests, human-rights lawyers counter. If anything, alien tort suits improve America’s standing abroad, says Katherine Gallagher, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based nonprofit that files alien tort suits.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 27, 2009 (boomark / email).