The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ended a 15-year-old lawsuit by Falun Gong members accusing Cisco Systems of helping China surveil and persecute them, reversing a lower court decision that had revived the case and further narrowing the reach of a federal law used to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses abroad.
The justices reversed the ninth U.S. circuit court of appeals, which in 2023 had allowed the case to move toward trial. The lawsuit, brought under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789, alleged that San Jose, California-based Cisco knowingly developed technology that allowed China’s government to surveil Falun Gong members, who have been persecuted by Beijing since 1999.
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit, filed the suit in 2011 on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2014, ruling that the alleged conduct was not sufficiently connected to the United States for the case to proceed. The lawsuit then stalled for many years, in part because of a series of Supreme Court decisions since 2013 limiting the Alien Tort Statute’s reach.
The San Francisco-based ninth circuit revived the case in 2023 and allowed it to move toward discovery, the evidence-gathering phase before a trial. The court ruled that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged “that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng (crackdown) of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”
The underlying lawsuit accused Cisco of knowingly designing and implementing the “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 then torture Falun Gong members. Cisco called the allegations “unfounded and offensive.”
The Trump administration sided with Cisco in the case, according to the Guardian.
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, was banned by the Chinese government in 1999 after thousands of members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in a silent protest. The group has called for people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong members founded The Epoch Times, a right-leaning U.S. media outlet that has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist Party and supportive of Trump.
The Alien Tort Statute had been dormant for nearly two centuries before lawyers began using it in the 1980s to bring international human rights cases in U.S. courts. The Cisco case posed the question of whether the law creates liability for corporations that “aid and abet” human rights abuses, a form of what is called accomplice liability.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 and 2018 that plaintiffs suing corporations under the statute for overseas human rights violations must show a strong connection between the alleged conduct and actions that took place in the United States. In a 2021 opinion, the court threw out a lawsuit accusing Cargill Inc and a Nestlé SA subsidiary of knowingly helping perpetuate slavery at Côte d’Ivoire cocoa farms, ruling that the plaintiffs had not shown that any of the relevant conduct took place within the United States.
By reversing the ninth circuit, the court closed off the Falun Gong plaintiffs’ path to discovery and trial under the Alien Tort Statute. The ruling continues a pattern of Supreme Court decisions since 2013 that have narrowed the statute, leaving U.S. corporations with limited exposure in U.S. courts for alleged involvement in human rights abuses committed abroad.