Pirates of the Corporation (MoJo)

[struggle4progress]

By Joshua Kurlantzick
July/August 2005 Issue

<snip> 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 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. <snip>

http://www.motherjones.com/news/outfront/2005/07/ATCA.html

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