A majority of the Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of a lawsuit by Falun Gong members who claim that an American tech company helped the Chinese government to target them for torture.
The lawsuit asserts that Cisco Systems Inc. helped the Chinese government create an internet censorship program, known as the Golden Shield, that enabled the government to surveil and harm members of the spiritual movement, which is banned in China.
At issue before the Supreme Court is whether American courts can judge such disputes. During oral arguments on Tuesday, several of the court’s conservatives raised concerns about allowing the lawsuit to proceed, suggesting that the executive branch and Congress, not the courts, were best equipped to handle allegations of human rights abuses in other countries.
“I’m concerned at a separation-of-powers level,” said Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, adding that he worried that allowing such lawsuits might give Congress less of an incentive to take action.
It was not clear whether the conservative justices were in complete agreement about how to treat the issue, but several expressed concerns that lower courts had allowed too many similar cases that aim to hold companies and people responsible for human rights abuses abroad.
The case before the court, Cisco Systems Inc. v. Doe, was initially filed in 2011. It came to the Supreme Court after a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed in July 2023 that the lawsuit could continue, finding that the Falun Gong members had met a legal threshold to press their claims.
