US supreme court ends lawsuit alleging Cisco helped China pursue Falun Gong | US supreme court

⁠The U.S. supreme court on Tuesday issued a decision ending a lawsuit in which members of the Falun Gong movement accused Cisco Systems of facilitating religious persecution in China, further limiting the scope of federal law used to hold companies accountable for human rights abuses committed abroad.

The justices overturned a lower court decision that breathed new life into the 2011 case filed under the 1789 Alien Tort Statute. The lawsuit alleged that Cisco knowingly developed technology that allowed the Chinese government to spy on and persecute Falun Gong members.

The Alien Tort Statute had been dormant for nearly two centuries before lawyers began using it to bring international human rights cases to U.S. courts in the 1980s. The Cisco case raised the question of whether the law creates a type of liability called accomplice liability for companies that “aid and abet” human rights violations.

The lawsuit accused San Jose, California-based Cisco of knowingly designing and implementing “Golden Shield,” an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist party to target dissidents. The plaintiffs said China used the system to track and torture Falun Gong members.

Cisco said the allegations were false and offensive.

Donald Trump’s administration sided with Cisco in the lawsuit.

The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, filed a lawsuit against Cisco on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. A judge dismissed the case in 2014, saying the alleged conduct was not sufficiently connected to the United States for the case to proceed.

The case has stalled for many years, in part because of a series of supreme court decisions since 2013 that have limited the scope of the Alien Torts Statute and made it harder to hold U.S. companies legally responsible for human rights abuses.

Founded in China in 1992, Falun Gong was banned by the Chinese government in 1999 after thousands of members staged a silent protest at the central leadership building in Beijing. The group called on people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning US media outlet called The Epoch Times, which has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist party and supports Trump.

The ninth U.S. appeals court, based in San Francisco, revived the case in 2023, allowing the case to move toward discovery, the pretrial evidence-gathering phase.

The Ninth Circuit held that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged that “Cisco provided basic technical assistance to the douzheng (suppression) of Falun Gong with the awareness that violations of international law such as torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial executions were likely to occur on a large scale.”

In 2013 and 2018 cases, the high court limited plaintiffs’ ability to sue companies in U.S. courts under the Alien Torts Act for human rights violations abroad. In those decisions, the court said there must be a strong connection between the alleged conduct and actions that occurred in the United States.

In a 2021 opinion, the U.S. supreme court threw out a lawsuit accusing Cargill Inc. and a Nestlé SA subsidiary of knowingly aiding the perpetuation of slavery on Ivory Coast cocoa plantations, ruling that the plaintiffs had not shown that any of the relevant conduct occurred in the United States.