The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that foreigners can file lawsuits in American courts to address some abuses overseas, a decision legal experts said may provide an opening for human rights cases filed against Unocal Corp. and other companies to move forward.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices said the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789 permits foreigners to sue in the U.S. for violations of certain international laws. The decision was the court's first major ruling on the obscure law that has been used successfully by Holocaust survivors and relatives of people tortured or killed under dictatorships overseas.
In the majority opinion written by Justice David H. Souter, the court said the door to alien tort suits "is still ajar subject to vigilant doorkeeping, and thus open to a narrow class of international norms today."
Business groups had hoped the Supreme Court would eliminate the use of U.S. courts to enforce international law.
But they applauded Tuesday's decision nonetheless, asserting it would sharply curtail such suits.
Human rights advocates also claimed victory, saying that suits alleging corporate complicity in crimes such as summary execution, torture and slavery were exactly the type of international standards the court cited.
Lawyers on both sides predicted that the first test of the ruling would come in a celebrated case involving El Segundo-based Unocal.
Fifteen Myanmar refugees have sued the oil giant in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging that the company is liable for murder, rape and forced labor allegedly committed by soldiers guarding a gas pipeline project.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling before deciding whether the claims of the Myanmar villagers should go to trial.
Tuesday's decision bodes well for the villagers, said Harold Hongju Koh, incoming dean of Yale University's law school and former assistant secretary of State for human rights.
A majority of the court upheld the doctrine that "allows litigants to sue for well-established violations of human rights," Koh said. "They essentially adopted the language of past decisions" by lower courts, including the 9th Circuit, in a line of alien tort suits against foreign dictators, such as the late Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and their henchmen.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia did not join Souter's opinion.
