The Global Context of Human Rights Violations

The Impact of the Alien Tort Claims Act

Abstract

Corporate responsibility for human rights violations has historically been approached as a domestic national issue in the United States. That is, despite international legislation governing human rights violations in an international context, courts have generally held that the activities of U.S. corporations outside the United States involving individuals who are not U.S. citizens does not fall within the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. This has been consistently affirmed at the Supreme Court level; and, indeed, the court has been zealous in seeking to avoid any reference at all to legislation like the European Human Rights Act in writing opinions.
This view of culpability for human rights violations has recently changed, both informally, with the emergence of global guidelines regarding human rights applying to corporations such as the Global Reporting Initiative, Amnesty International Guidelines and O.E.C.D. guidelines for Transnational Corporations and with the application of an 18th century law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, that has been used to sue corporations for human rights violations outside the United States.
A suit was brought against Unocal, a California based oil corporation, for complicity in crimes committed against Burmese citizens under this Act. The 9th District Circuit Court of Appeals held in this case that Unocal had a case to answer for complicity in the rape and murder of Burmese citizens perpetrated by the ruling military junta. Recently, Unocal settled out of court in what is reported to be a sizeable financial settlement. Additional lawsuits have been brought against Ford Motor Corporation for its complicity in the holocaust by providing military vehicles to the German Army through their German subsidiary and I.B.M. for providing counting machinery for concentration camps during the Second World War. Cases involving other countries include the conduct of business with the South African apartheid government by several U.S. based corporations. These cases raise a new concept of corporate responsibility in a global setting as they depend upon an assumption of moral responsibility by corporations for violations of human rights committed by regimes with which they do business. This paper examines the implications of this changed context for corporate responsibility in the context of the emergence of the multiple voluntary guidelines that seek to hold corporations accountable for conduct outside their own countries.