Alien Tort Claims Act

Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), U.S. law, originally a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789, that grants to U.S. federal courts original jurisdiction over any civil action brought by an alien (a foreign national) for a tort in violation of international law or a U.S. treaty. (A tort is any wrongful act not involving a breach of contract for which a civil suit can be brought.) Beginning in the 1980s, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) was used as the basis of suits against individuals for violations of international human rights law; from the mid-1990s it was also used against corporations for complicity in human rights violations and for environmental crimes.

In 1980 the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in Filártiga v. Peña-Irala that the ATCA could be used to sue a Paraguayan police officer for acts of torture that he had committed in Paraguay. The “well-established universal” prohibition of torture under international law, the court held, must be honoured in U.S. courts, regardless of the nationality of the victim or the perpetrator. In a later decision, Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. (1995), the Second Circuit permitted Nigerian émigrés in the United States to sue two foreign holding companies for their alleged participation in human rights abuses committed against the Ogoni people of Nigeria by Nigerian government forces. The case also involved allegations of coercive land appropriation and claims of air and water pollution. The companies eventually settled out of court in 2009 for $15.5 million. In 1996, in Mushikiwabo v. Barayagwiza, a U.S. district court awarded $105 million to five Rwandan citizens for the torture and execution of their relatives by government forces and Hutu militias during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Also in 1996 a group of human rights activists sued the Unocal Corporation under the ATCA on behalf of anonymous (“John Doe”) Burmese farmers, alleging the company’s complicity in human rights abuses committed by Burmese security forces (including forced labour, forced relocation, rape, and murder) in connection with the construction of the Yadana natural gas pipeline in southern Myanmar. Doe v. Unocal was settled in 2005 for an undisclosed sum.

Lawsuits brought under the ATCA that allege environmental rather than human rights crimes have tended to be dismissed on procedural or jurisdictional grounds. In Aguinda, et al. v. Texaco, for example, a group of Ecuadorian Indians sued the Texaco petroleum corporation in 1993 for having caused severe environmental damage to their homeland through improper oil-exploration and waste-disposal practices. After years of litigation, the Second Circuit agreed (2002) with the district court that the United States was not the proper venue for the suit, which was then refiled in Ecuador in 2003.

In 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court issued the first of two decisions that significantly limited the scope of lawsuits that could be brought under the ATCA. In Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, the court held that the ATCA applies only to violations of international norms that are “specific, universal, and obligatory,” and it determined that general prohibitions against arbitrary arrest and detention did not meet that standard. And in 2013 the court ruled in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, regarding a foreign petroleum corporation’s alleged complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria, that the ATCA generally does not apply to torts committed in foreign countries—though exceptions are possible in cases “where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States” with “sufficient force.”