Car firms must face claims as Alien Tort cases proceed

Charges against three global car companies alleging human rights abuses in South Africa have been allowed to proceed.

A New York judge has ruled that Daimler, Ford and General Motors should remain in a lawsuit accusing them of aiding and abetting apartheid, torture, extrajudicial killing and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in South Africa. The charges allege the companies’ security personnel were ‘intimately involved’ in torture and mistreatment committed by the South African government’s armed forces.

The cases, which include complaints on behalf of South Africans seeking damages for victimization by apartheid governments, are only a few among thousands of lawsuits brought under the Alien Tort statute against US-based multinationals for their dealings with the apartheid regime between 1960 and 1994.

Other recent decisions include a ruling that IBM should remain in a suit that alleges it aided and abetted apartheid because it provided the computers and software used by the government to strip people of their citizenship. However, similar claims against Barclays Bank and UBS for loaning money and backing the purchase of South African army bonds have been dismissed.

The Alien Tort Act allows US courts to hear human rights cases brought by foreign citizens for conduct committed in other countries. But since the first completed case, which cleared the mining company Drummond Coal of human rights abuses (EP9, issue 4, p6), other suits have sought to clarify various legal issues around the Act.

Although it still has a long way to go, the latest South African apartheid litigation decision specifically rules that companies can have ‘knowledge’ that they are assisting a crime, rather than ‘intent’, which is harder to prove in court.

But simply conducting business in a country with a poor human rights record, or even helping to finance the country, is unlikely to amount to ‘aiding and abetting’ liability under the Act, according the court’s decision.

Judges also decided that conspiracy, something relatively easy to prove in court, is not a form of liability universally accepted by developed nations, and therefore should not be applied in Alien Tort cases.

A US lawyer for the plaintiffs, Michael Hausfeld, said the recent rulings had made the legal picture clearer and provided ‘a major advancement in international human rights law’.

The latest moves come as the US agribusiness Chiquita, accused of funding paramilitaries in Colombia, is trying to dismiss Alien Tort claims against its Colombian subsidiary and other defendants associated with the company (EP11, issue 2, p9).

l  A federal judge in an Alien Tort case in San Francisco has ruled that suits filed against Chevron be dismissed on the basis they are bogus. The cases were based on cancer said to have arisen from the company’s chemical operations in Ecuador, but have been adjudged to be false because some of the alleged victims never had the disease, and did not even know a US lawsuit was going forward in their names.