By Jan Wolfe
April 28 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court confronted a case on Tuesday with broad implications for human rights litigation in American courts, a long-running lawsuit brought by members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement who have accused Cisco Systems of facilitating religious persecution in China.
The justices heard arguments in Cisco's appeal of a lower court's 2023 ruling that breathed new life into the 2011 lawsuit, brought under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789, that accused the company of knowingly developing technology that allowed China's government to surveil and persecute Falun Gong members.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority, and some of its conservative justices signaled agreement with the stance taken by Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer for Cisco, during the arguments.
San Jose, California-based Cisco urged the Supreme Court to further limit the scope of the Alien Tort Statute, which lets non-U.S. citizens seek damages in American courts for violations of international law. The court in a series of decisions since 2013 has restricted the law's reach, making it more difficult to hold U.S. corporations legally liable for human rights abuses.
President Donald Trump's administration sided with Cisco in the case.
Paul Hoffman, a lawyer for the Falun Gong plaintiffs, argued strenuously against Cisco's views.
"Under Cisco's theory, even the corporate actors who provided the poison gas for Nazi crematoria would not be liable" under the Alien Tort Statute, Hoffman told the justices.
"There is no basis in international law," Hoffman said, "for such an absurd result."
The 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 allege that China used the system to track and then torture Falun Gong members.
Cisco has called the allegations unfounded and offensive.
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 poses 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.
Cisco is arguing that the 9th Circuit overstepped its authority when it interpreted that law as allowing for liability for aiding and abetting.
"Such a cause of action would pose grave harms to foreign policy and the separation of powers," Shanmugam told the justices, referring to the constitutional delineation of authority among the U.S. government's legislative, judicial and executive branches.
"It is for Congress, not this court, to provide for aiding and abetting liability," Shanmugam told the justices.
Justice Department lawyer Curtis Gannon, arguing for the Trump administration, said a ruling in favor of Cisco would be consistent with "a modern understanding of the court's appropriate role in the separation of powers."
'A LACK OF CLARITY'
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the court needs to revisit earlier precedents to make clear its skepticism of efforts to expand the application of the Alien Tort Statute.
"We're not really allowing suits to go forward, but Congress thinks we are because of a lack of clarity in our case law," Kavanaugh said.
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch said the court's precedents make clear that "the responsibility for creating causes of action generally lies not with judges but with Congress."
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, sued Cisco on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members.
A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2014, saying the alleged conduct did not have a sufficient enough connection to the United States for the case to go forward. The case stalled for many years, in part because of a string of rulings in other Alien Tort Statute cases that made them harder to bring.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the case and allowed it to move toward discovery, the evidence-gathering phase before a trial.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of June.
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, was banned by China's government in 1999 after thousands of members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. The group has called for people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning U.S. media outlet called The Epoch Times that has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist Party and supports Trump.
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
