How was the Bhopal case handled?
Keith Addison wrote:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2005/07/ATCA.html
Pirates of the Corporation
News: Holding American companies responsible for high crimes committed
overseas.
By Joshua Kurlantzick
July/August 2005 Issue
IN THE SPRING of 2003, Terry Collingsworth was holed up in a Bangkok
hotel, meeting with a group of Burmese villagers. Terrified by horrors
they'd witnessed in Burma, the villagers had contacted local human
rights activists, who in turn had gone to Collingsworth, executive
director of a small Washington nonprofit called the International
Labor Rights Fund, for salvation. Now, almost 10 years later, over the
course of days in the hotel, Collingsworth was still sifting through
the tales of abuse. The group had claimed that the oil company Unocal
had hired Burmese army troops to secure the construction of a pipeline
through the country, and that the troops had forced people living near
the pipeline into slave labor. One woman was allegedly shoved into a
fire holding her baby. Collingsworth, a wiry, clean-cut lawyer who
speaks in rat-a-tat phrases and travels incessantly to meet with
clients all over the developing world, was affected by their stories
but not intimidated. He himself had witnessed and survived many
desperate situations, like the time two years earlier, while visiting
potential clients in Aceh, Indonesia, he made it through 17 army
checkpoints before driving right into a gunfight between rebels and
the army.
Collingsworth had carried the stories of the Burmese villagers halfway
around the globe and into the United States justice system. There he
had applied to their assertions a peculiar and potentially powerful
law, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA). In 1789, Congress passed the
statute-daring in scope for a young nation-that said violations of
international law, the "law of nations," could be heard by judges in
the United States. Scholars speculate that the ATCA's intent was to
protect American sailors from being press-ganged by foreign ships or
to prevent pirates from finding safe haven in American waters. As
those concerns waned, the law went dormant and stayed nearly forgotten
for two centuries.
Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, lawyers began using the ATCA
to sue foreign human rights abusers on behalf of not only Americans
but also injured citizens of foreign countries with weak judiciaries-a
radical notion in the age of Abu Ghraib. More recently, these
attorneys have dared go after not just individuals but corporations,
filing ATCA cases seeking to hold American companies responsible for
abetting the worst crimes overseas-like torture, forced labor, and
genocide.
So far, lawyers have filed more than two dozen such cases. One charges
Coca-Cola with abetting the murder of trade unionists in Colombia;
another alleges that a subsidiary of ChevronTexaco helped Nigerian
soldiers who shot protesters in the oil-rich Niger Delta; another,
filed by Collingsworth for clients in Aceh, charges ExxonMobil with
providing infrastructure for a killer squad of the Indonesian
military, even supplying the army with earthmovers to dig mass graves.
Still another, filed by survivors of 9/11, claims that seven
international banks abetted terrorism. And, in the boldest cases filed
so far, Iraqis and Afghans allegedly tortured at U.S. prison camps
have sued not only several military contractors but Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld as well.
No plaintiff has yet won an ATCA case against a company, but
Collingsworth has persisted, pitting his small staff against the
nation's white- shoe firms and weathering appeal after appeal. ("At no
point did I feel their 180 lawyers gave them an advantage," he says
staunchly.) In December, he facilitated the first legal settlement
under the ATCA by a multinational company-a payout by Unocal to the
Burmese villagers. After the Supreme Court determined that the law
could indeed be used against companies, Unocal agreed to pay the
villagers a sum in the tens of millions.
Elliot Schrage, a former senior vice president at Gap who is now at
the Council on Foreign Relations, believes this was a turning point.
"The Unocal settlement legitimates the idea that [ATCA] is a real
business risk," he says. So serious a risk, in fact, that big business
and the White House have gone on the offensive to undermine it.
Multinationals have grouped together to file briefs seeking to scuttle
ATCA cases, and the National Foreign Trade Council, an organization of
corporate giants, has been touting a study warning that ATCA suits
could "seriously damage the world economy." Another study cautions
that the threat of ATCA suits could discourage companies from
rebuilding countries like war-torn Iraq. Some companies have
considered drafting legislation that could kill or seriously limit the
ATCA-legislation that could be pushed through Congress with little
fanfare. Yet Collingsworth thinks there's still time to win
settlements or decisions in other cases. "The business community," he
says, "doesn't yet have a champion to stand up and say they're
repealing a statute that prohibits slavery [and] dates back to the
nation's founding."
The White House has launched its own backdoor strike on the law,
filing briefs and letters in support of companies accused in ATCA
cases. The administration argues that the suits will damage America's
relations with other countries and impede the war on terror. In one
letter obtained by Mother Jones, the State Department's legal adviser,
William H. Taft IV, claimed that an ATCA suit against mining giant Rio
Tinto's operations in Papua New Guinea would damage "an important
United States foreign policy objective"-evidently U.S. relations with
that obscure island nation have become a critical diplomatic matter.
Other corporate defendants are now requesting that the State
Department intervene with letters in their favor.
As Schrage has put it, "The message of these actions appears to be
that the Bush administration opposes enforcement of international law
standards against multinational corporations." But the White House may
be motivated by something more than unilateralism. The ATCA "is a real
problem for this government," notes Sarah Cleveland, an ATCA expert at
the University of Texas School of Law. For, as some Iraqis and Afghans
have begun to realize, a law that holds corporations responsible for
torture and abuse just might do the same for government officials.
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