Apartheid Lawsuit Puts Corporations on Notice
Monday, November 12, 2007 at 01:11PM In giving the go-ahead to a historic class-action suit against businesses that sold to South Africa's apartheid regime, a federal appellate court here has put the world's largest companies on notice that they can be held liable for doing business with foreign regimes that commit human-rights abuses.
The decision last month by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan revives several class-action suits brought by South Africans against the arms suppliers, oil producers, and computer manufacturers that sold goods to the apartheid government during the second half of the 20th century.
The claims earlier had been dismissed by a lower court as being beyond the jurisdiction of American courts.
The 2-1 ruling, with Judges Peter Hall and Robert Katzmann in the majority, means that a Manhattan judge yet may oversee compensation of billions of dollars to South African blacks who lived under apartheid rule. That prospect raises profound questions about the role of American courts in providing a place of reckoning for the wrongs of foreign governments.
Previous court rulings by federal judges here had left it uncertain whether corporations can be sued in American courts for acting as accomplices to foreign governments committing atrocities. The effect of the decision is to "give courts the green light to hear suits against corporations for their connections to abusive regimes," a law professor at Duke University, Curtis Bradley, who served as counselor on international law at the State Department in 2004, said.
The 2nd Circuit now joins two other appellate courts in the West and Southeast in allowing American courts to impose accomplice liability on corporations for human-rights violations against international law. This emerging consensus has arisen without any nod of congressional approval since the First Congress adopted the Alien Torts Statute in 1789, which courts now use to assert jurisdiction in these cases. Still, the 2nd Circuit sets a relatively high bar for finding that a company is liable as an accomplice in apartheid, torture, or assassination.
