A majority of the Supreme Court appeared skeptical on Tuesday of a lawsuit by Falun Gong members who say a US technology company helped the Chinese government target them for torture.
The lawsuit alleges that Cisco Systems Inc. helped the Chinese government create an Internet censorship program known as Golden Shield that allowed the government to track and harm members of a spiritual movement banned in China.
At issue before the Supreme Court is whether US courts can hear such disputes. During oral arguments Tuesday, several of the court’s conservatives expressed concern about allowing the lawsuit to proceed, suggesting that the executive branch and Congress, not the courts, are best equipped to handle allegations of human rights abuses in other countries.
“I am concerned about the level of separation of powers,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, adding that he worried that allowing such lawsuits could give Congress less incentive to act.
It was unclear whether the conservative justices were in complete agreement on how to approach the issue, but several expressed concern that lower courts have allowed too many similar cases to hold companies and people accountable for human rights abuses abroad.
The case before the court, Cisco Systems Inc. v. Doewas originally filed in 2011. It reached the Supreme Court after a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed in July 2023 that the lawsuit can proceed when it is determined that Falun Gong members have reached the legal threshold for asserting their claims.
Cisco, which denies the allegations in the lawsuit, asked the judge to consider it. The Trump administration joined the case in support of Cisco.
Falun Gong is a religious movement that began in China about three decades ago. Since then, she has gained a worldwide following, touting the non-violence and health benefits of her meditative practices.
The Chinese government banned the group after Falun Gong followers held a peaceful rally outside the Communist Party headquarters in Beijing in April 1999. The group’s effectiveness in mobilizing and organizing its followers has alarmed Chinese leaders, and its practitioners have reportedly been persecuted, imprisoned and tortured by the government.
Falun Gong members accused Cisco Systems of Alien Tort Statutea 1789 federal law that allows foreign nationals to bring lawsuits in U.S. federal courts for alleged wrongs committed in violation of international law or U.S. treaties.
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They argue that the San Jose, California-based company helped the Chinese government design and develop a censorship and surveillance system that contained a database of the locations, contact information and other personal information of Falun Gong practitioners. The plaintiffs allege that Cisco did much of this work in its offices in the United States.
The Falun Gong practitioners who filed the lawsuit allege that the Chinese government used Cisco technology to identify them and subject them to forced conversion and torture.
The court has dealt with the scope of the law before. In 2004, the judges heard Sosa v. Alvarez-Machaina case that involved the arrest and trial of Humberto Álvarez-Machaín, a Mexican national charged with the 1985 kidnapping and murder of a US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent. Mr. Álvarez-Machaín alleged that the DEA had hired several Mexican nationals to capture him and argued that his abduction violated the law.
In this case, the judges found that the law was most likely originally intended to allow lawsuits only for three specific violations of international standards: violations of rules enabling safe conduct in other countries, violations of ambassadorial rights, and piracy.
Although the Supreme Court has never recognized other causes of action under the statute, lower courts have found many.
Tuesday’s dispute also involved the Torture Victims Protection Act, a 1991 law that allows lawsuits in US courts against people who engage in torture or extrajudicial killings while acting under the authority of a foreign nation.
On Tuesday, Paul L. Hoffman, a lawyer for Falun Gong members, urged the judge to clear the way for the lawsuit, arguing that Cisco helped create a “customized surveillance system” that allowed the Chinese government to target the religious minority for “barbaric treatment.”
Kannon K. Shanmugam, a lawyer for Cisco, argued that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would be a “significant expansion” of the current law and raise “substantial foreign policy concerns.”
Trump administration lawyer Curtis E. Gannon, deputy solicitor general, told the justices that “the lower courts have been too lenient” in allowing such lawsuits to continue.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s two liberals, appeared sharply skeptical of Cisco and the Trump administration’s arguments.
A decision in the case is expected in late June or early July.
