Supreme Court to consider Cisco bid to halt Falun Gong lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Friday to take up an appeal from Cisco seeking to shut down a lawsuit brought by Falun Gong members alleging that the company’s technology was used to persecute members of the spiritual movement in China.

The justices said they will hear arguments in the spring and will review an appellate ruling that would allow the lawsuit against Cisco to go forward in U.S. courts.

The court acted after the Trump administration weighed in on Cisco’s behalf, urging the justices to hear the case, according to the Associated Press.

The underlying dispute traces to claims that American companies helped build China’s surveillance capabilities used against dissent and religious groups. The AP investigation described in its reporting said that American tech companies, to a large degree, designed and built China’s surveillance state, encouraged by Republican and Democratic administrations.

The AP report also pointed to leaked documents from 2008, which it said showed Cisco viewing China’s “Golden Shield” internet censorship effort as a sales opportunity. It said Cisco quoted a Chinese official calling the Falun Gong an “evil cult,” and that a Cisco presentation reviewed by AP said its products could identify over 90% of Falun Gong material on the web.

Other Cisco presentations reviewed by AP, according to the story, described Falun Gong material as a “threat” and built a national information system intended to track Falun Gong believers. In 2011, Falun Gong members sued Cisco alleging that the company tailored technology for Beijing that it knew would be used to track, detain and torture believers, the report said.

The question before the Supreme Court, AP reported, is whether an American company can be held liable under two separate laws for aiding and abetting human rights violations. Cisco argues, according to the report, that it is not liable under the 18th-century Alien Tort Statute (ATS) or the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), first enacted in 1991.

In recent years, the AP story said, the Supreme Court and presidential administrations of both parties have been skeptical of lawsuits that use U.S. courts as a venue to seek justice over acts of foreign governments, especially those that took place abroad. To address that skepticism, Falun Gong members have argued that a substantial portion of Cisco’s activities involving China took place in the United States, AP said.

A decision is expected by early summer.