On behalf of a coalition of human rights and labor organizations, EarthRights International (ERI) filed an amicus brief challenging a recent court decision that granted corporations immunity from lawsuits alleging serious human rights abuses.  In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that corporations could not be sued under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a U.S. law that allows lawsuits for violations of international law--including human rights abuses such as torture and crimes against humanity.  The Kiobel decision goes against years of precedent, including ERI's own cases against Unocal, Chevron, and Shell, and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of international law.  (ERI has written [2]four [3] blog [4] posts [5] related to the Kiobel decision.)

Major human rights and labor groups joined together to support a rehearing in the Kiobel case, including Human Rights Watch, the largest human rights organization in the U.S., and two of the largest unions in the U.S., the Service Employees International Union and the United Steel Workers, as well as the Center for Constitutional Rights, Global Witness, the International Labor Rights Forum, the World Organization for Human Rights USA, the Human Rights Law Foundation, and Accountability Counsel.  All the groups are concerned with the enforcement of international law against corporations, and disagree with the Second Circuit's decision and reasoning.

The brief, which ERI drafted, argues that the Kiobel decision wrongly relies on the fact that corporations cannot be brought before any international tribunal to conclude that corporations are not subject to international law.  Because the ATS is a domestic remedy for violations of international law, and because international law has always primarily been enforced through domestic mechanisms, it makes no sense to limit the enforcement of international law to the few areas in which international tribunals have been created.

The Kiobel case was brought as a companion to Wiwa v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, on which ERI was counsel, and similarly concerns human rights abuses against the Ogoni people of Nigeria.  The human rights and labor organizations' brief was filed to support the Kiobel plaintiffs' petition for rehearing in the case.  At least four other amicus briefs have been filed supporting rehearing, including briefs on behalf of international law scholars, scholars of the Holocaust and the Nuremburg trials, legal historians, and federal jurisdiction professors.

Court Documents (PDF)

• Decision by the Second Circuit in Kiobel Appeal and Cross-Appeal [6]
• Kiobel Plaintiffs' Petition for Rehearing [7]
• ERI Amicus Brief on Behalf of Human Rights and Labor Organizations [8]
• Amicus Brief of International Law Scholars [9]
• Amicus Brief Legal Historians [10]
• Amicus Brief of Federal Jurisdiction Professors [11]
• Amicus Brief of Nuremburg Scholars [12]