WASHINGTON (LN) — A Supreme Court majority appeared poised Tuesday to further narrow the use of U.S. courts as a forum for international human-rights claims, signaling after roughly two hours of oral argument in Cisco Systems v. Doe that the California technology company may not be sued for allegedly helping the Chinese government build a surveillance system that plaintiffs say was used to identify, detain, and torture practitioners of the Falun Gong religion.
The plaintiffs — a group of Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen, Charles Lee — sued Cisco, its CEO John Chambers, and Fredy Cheung, the vice-president of Cisco's China subsidiary, under two federal statutes: the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows foreigners to sue in U.S. courts for serious violations of international law, and the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1992 law that permits suits against individuals who subject others to torture while acting on behalf of a foreign government.
At the center of the case is the Golden Shield, a massive online surveillance system that the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese security officials sought to develop to track down Falun Gong practitioners. The plaintiffs contend that Cisco, Chambers, and Cheung aided and abetted that effort — specifically, that they "designed, implemented and helped to maintain a surveillance and internal security network" that made it easier for Chinese officials to identify practitioners of the religion.
The Falun Gong religion began in China in the 1990s and had as many as 100 million practitioners there by the time the Chinese government designated groups associated with it as illegal in 1999. The plaintiffs allege the Golden Shield technology was then turned against them and their family members, leading to arrests and serious abuses including torture, forced labor, beatings, and forced conversions.
The case arrives at the high court after the en banc Ninth Circuit — which, because that court is so large, consists of only a subset of all the judges on the court — ruled in 2023 that the plaintiffs' aiding-and-abetting claims could proceed. Seven judges dissented from that court's decision not to rehear the case, and the Supreme Court agreed in January to weigh in.
Tuesday's argument suggested that a majority of the justices seemed to side with Cisco, though the precise contours of any ruling remained unsettled. What was less clear, the argument indicated, was exactly how narrow the court's eventual rule might be — a question with significant consequences for the broader universe of human-rights litigation against American corporations.
The outcome will determine whether the Alien Tort Statute remains a viable vehicle for victims of alleged international law violations to reach U.S. companies in federal court, or whether the court's decades-long project of narrowing that 1789 law takes another decisive step forward.