The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear an appeal by Cisco Systems
in which the tech company and President Donald Trump’s administration are asking the justices to limit the reach of a federal law that has been used to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses committed abroad.
Cisco has appealed a 2023 ruling that breathed new life into a 2011 lawsuit that accused the California-based company of knowingly developing technology that allowed China’s government to surveil and persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Cisco has called the lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages, unfounded and offensive, saying it sold technology to China that is expressly legal under U.S. trade policy.
The lawsuit was premised on the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that 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. Cisco, with backing from the Trump administration, is asking the Supreme Court to use the case as an opportunity to limit the reach of the Alien Tort Statute.
