WASHINGTON—Absolving Cisco of its alleged complicity in aiding human rights abuses in China would risk encouraging more corporations to sell out business ethics for money, the Supreme Court heard on April 28.
The case in question, Cisco Systems v. Doe I et al., accused the California tech giant of knowingly developing a surveillance network for Beijing to go after practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement the regime has persecuted heavily since 1999.
Filed in 2011, the long-running lawsuit alleged that Cisco and top executives aided and abetted forced disappearance and systematic abuse of Falun Gong practitioners across China. The Supreme Court will decide if the 1789 Alien Tort Statute and the 1991 Torture Victim Protection Act allow for liability for international human rights violations….