By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an appeal by Cisco Systems in which the tech company and 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 California-based company of knowingly developing technology that allowed China’s government to surveil and persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Cisco has called the lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages, unfounded and offensive, saying it sold technology to China that is expressly legal under U.S. trade policy.
The lawsuit was premised on the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that 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. Cisco, with backing from the Trump administration, is asking the Supreme Court to use the case as an opportunity to limit the reach of the Alien Tort Statute.
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, combines meditation, slow-motion exercises, moral teachings broadly based on Buddhism and Taoism and leader Li Hongzhi’s sometimes unorthodox theories such as his belief that aliens have started to take over the world. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning U.S. media outlet called The Epoch Times that has been heavily critical of China’s Communist Party and supports Trump.
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 imprisoned some of its members.
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, sued Cisco in 2011 on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. The lawsuit accused Cisco 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.
The initial plaintiffs included Chinese and U.S. citizens who said they were subjected in China to forced conversion, among other abuses. Some of the plaintiffs said they endured beatings with steel rods, shocking with electric batons, sleep deprivation, and violent force-feeding.
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 July 2023 ruling, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. 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.”
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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