Alien Tort Statute News — Plus!

After a series of narrowing opinions from the Supreme Court in recent years, developments in the past few weeks were encouraging both for litigants hoping to use the Alien Tort Statute to establish jurisdiction of  U.S. courts over human rights controversies and those seeking alternative venues for holding corporations accountable for human rights violations.  

On February 19, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit revived a $1 billion lawsuit by Palestinians seeking to hold billionaire Sheldon Adelson and more than 30 other pro-Israel defendants liable for alleged war crimes and support of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.  In a 3-0 decision, the court said a federal district judge wrongly concluded in August 2017 that all of the plaintiffs’ claims raised political questions that could not be decided in American courts.  Rather, opined the court, the issues raised in the case — including a claim of genocide — were “purely legal” because genocide violates the law of nations.

Litigants are also seeking out alternative venues as U.S. courts have cut back on ATS jurisdiction.  In June 2017, Esther Kiobel and three other women launched a civil case in the Netherlands against Shell, claiming that the company was complicit in the 1995 killings of their husbands – raising the same facts that were alleged in the US Kiobel litigation.  The women alleged that Shell aided and abetted the Nigerian military dictatorship’s commission of violent human rights violations against members of a peaceful grassroots movement in the Ogoni region of Nigeria. The movement fought for Shell to clean up lands devastated by its oil operations in the Niger Delta—devastation that the United Nations Environmental Program has said will likely take up to thirty years to remediate. Shell has denied any involvement in their executions. A hearing took place on 12 February 2019 and a decision is expected on 8 May 2019.  More background on the case, which has included extensive litigation in the U.S. including multiple trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, is here.