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The Alien Tort Claims Act

By Michael C. Lynch and Lystra Batchoo

Yahoo!, the global Internet company, was accused by the families of jailed Chinese dissidents of abetting in the torture of pro-democracy activists by releasing data that allowed China's government to identify, arrest, and imprison the activists. Unocal, a California oil company, has been confronted with charges in a U.S. court of being complicit in the alleged forced labor, rape, and murder of Burmese citizens ' actually committed by the Burmese military government. Chiquita has been sued ' in a U.S. court ' in a case where it admitted paying money to paramilitary groups in Colombia to protect its workers. These companies are not alone. Similar accusations based on the actions of corrupt or repressive foreign regimes have been levied in U.S. courts against many other multinational corporations, including Coca-Cola, Exxon-Mobil, Firestone, and Royal Dutch/Shell.

In recent years, companies doing business in countries where human rights or environmental violations have occurred have found themselves dragged into U.S. courts as defendants in lawsuits brought by foreign plaintiffs to account for violations ' often committed by others, including foreign governments. Although some of these cases are well-known, the legal foundation for the claims is not. An obscure piece of legislation passed more than 200 years ago was raised in the case against Yahoo! and many others like it. Unfortunately, this strategy is only becoming more relevant. Although the statute was initially interpreted to provide redress in limited situations involving foreigners, including to provide comfort to reluctant foreign diplomats traveling to the United States in the post-Revolutionary period, it has more recently been used by U.S. Plaintiff's lawyers as a popular way of hauling multinational corporations into U.S. courts for torts actually committed by others where the companies did business.

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