The Supreme Court on Tuesday ended a long-running lawsuit accusing Cisco Systems of helping China's government persecute religious practitioners, marking another major restriction on when American corporations can be held accountable in US courts for human rights abuses overseas.
The justices reversed a lower court decision that had revived the 2011 case brought by members of the Falun Gong movement under a 230-year-old federal statute. The plaintiffs alleged the San Jose technology company deliberately built surveillance infrastructure that China weaponized to track, detain, and torture their religious community.
Cisco called the accusations unfounded and offensive. The Trump administration sided with the company during litigation.
The lawsuit centered on the "Golden Shield," an internet surveillance system the Chinese Communist Party deployed against dissidents. The Human Rights Law Foundation, a Washington nonprofit, argued Cisco knowingly designed and implemented crucial components of that system while aware it would facilitate torture, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial killings of Falun Gong members.
The case turned on a single legal question: whether US corporations can face liability under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789 for aiding and abetting human rights crimes committed abroad. That statute lay dormant for nearly two centuries before lawyers began wielding it in the 1980s to bring international human rights cases to American courts.
A federal judge dismissed the Cisco suit in 2014, ruling the alleged conduct lacked sufficient connection to the United States. The case languished for years as the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions making it increasingly difficult to sue corporations under the law. In 2013 and 2018 rulings, justices imposed strict requirements that any overseas human rights violation must have strong ties to American soil.
That trajectory shifted briefly when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals revived the lawsuit in 2023. The appeals court found the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to China's crackdown on Falun Gong with awareness that international law violations were substantially likely to occur.
The Supreme Court rejected that reasoning Tuesday, further narrowing pathways for holding corporations accountable through American courts. In a 2021 decision, the court had already thrown out a slavery lawsuit against Cargill and a Nestlé subsidiary, ruling that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate the relevant conduct occurred within the United States.
Falun Gong, a spiritual movement founded in China in 1992, was banned by the government in 1999 after thousands of members gathered in silent protest at a central leadership compound in Beijing. The group later called on Chinese citizens to renounce Communist Party rule. Falun Gong adherents established The Epoch Times, a right-leaning American news outlet that has been sharply critical of Beijing and supportive of Trump.
Author James Rodriguez: "The court is making it nearly impossible for Americans to take foreign victims' claims seriously when corporate defendants happen to be based here."
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