High court bars rights suits against foreign corporations
WASHINGTON — Foreign corporations may not be sued in American courts for complicity in human rights abuses abroad, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday. The vote was 5-4, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a plurality of the justices, said such suits should not be allowed without explicit congressional authorization.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the Supreme Court had created a double standard for corporations.
The case decided on Tuesday concerned Arab Bank, which is based in Jordan and has been accused of processing financial transactions through a branch in New York for groups linked to terrorism. The plaintiffs in the case sought to hold the bank liable for attacks in Israel and in the Palestinian territories by Hamas and other groups.
The plaintiffs said the bank had “served as the ‘paymaster’ for Hamas and other terrorist organizations, helping them identify and pay the families of suicide bombers and other terrorists.”
The bank responded that it had helped the U.S. in “the fight against terrorism financing and money laundering” and was not accused by the plaintiffs of being “involved in the planning, financing or commission of the attacks that caused their injuries.”
The case turned on the meaning of the Alien Tort Statute, a cryptic 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”
The law was largely ignored until the 1980s, when federal courts started to apply it in international human rights cases.
Kennedy wrote that the evidence about whether suits against foreign corporations were among those norms was mixed. That meant, he wrote, that a clear answer from Congress was required before the suits could be allowed in light of the friction they can create.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas joined all of Kennedy’s opinion, and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch much of it.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Sotomayor’s dissent.