Source: https://classactionblawg.com/tag/atca/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 19:21:09+00:00

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Editor’s Note – This article, co-authored by my colleague Tina Amin, is a joint submission to CAB and the BakerHostetler Class Action Lawsuit Defense Blog. Please visit our firm’s blog for more riveting class action-related content.
Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, which is always a reminder of the Alien Tort statute (“ATS”), an arcane law that was originally enacted in 1789 in part to combat piracy. In recent years, the ATS has been used as a tool for bringing class actions seeking to redress alleged international civil rights abuses arising out of a wide range of conduct including genocide, torture, slavery, apartheid, and environmental contamination. In a recent ATS case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Case Nos. 06-4800-cv and 06-4876-cv, Nigerian plaintiffs alleged that the defendant company collaborated with the Nigerian government to commit extrajudicial killing, torture, crimes against humanity, and arbitrary arrest and detention. In its September 17, 2010 decision, the Second Circuit became the first appellate court to reject the proposition that a corporation can be liable under the ATS for such alleged complicity.
On October 17, 2011, the Supreme Court originally accepted Kiobel, No. 10-1491, to address the issue whether a corporation can be liable under the ATS for alleged complicity in human rights abuses by a foreign government. Oral argument in the Supreme Court was held on February 28, 2012. A week later, the Court requested supplemental briefing on two related issues. The first is on the broader issue of whether the U.S. courts have extra-territorial jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes about human rights abuses that occurred entirely outside U.S. borders. The Court also asked “under what circumstances” the ATS “allows courts to recognize a cause of action” for extraterritorial violations. The supplemental briefs were filed this summer.
Kiobel has broad potential implications for the future of international class actions in the U.S. courts. The case is the second in the last three years to raise questions of extraterritorial application of U.S. federal law, along with the Morrison v. National Australia Bank, No. 08-1191, June 24, 2010, which limited the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts over certain international securities class actions. To date, no federal appeals court has decided an ATS case based solely on an analysis of extraterritoriality, and the courts have assumed the extraterritorial reach of the law since it was resurrected from obscurity a few decades ago. A ruling for the defendant in Kiobel could be a further sign of a trend closing the doors of the U.S. courts to international class actions and other international disputes. If this occurs, expect to see additional developments in the area of collective multi-party procedure in other countries, as parties begin to seek redress elsewhere.
Oral argument in Kiobel is set for October 1, 2012.
NOTE: The following is a copy of a post that I did for the recently-released Baker Hostetler Class Action Lawsuit Defense Blog. Be sure to check out the new blog for other fantastic class-action-related content!
Globalization has brought with it the growing problem of how to deal with mass disputes that transcend jurisdictional boundaries, as well as ever-increasing creativity among the members of the plaintiffs’ bar in bringing ever-larger class and mass actions. There is no single global court or other forum for bringing international or cross-border civil disputes, let alone disputes that involve allegations of mass harm. One of the key challenges for lawyers, policymakers, consumers, and businesses in the 21st century is how to efficiently resolve international mass disputes given the realities of globalization and the lack of any clear forum.
From the late 1990s through the first decade of this century, there were several trends favoring the U.S. courts as a global forum for litigating international disputes. However, recently, that trend has reversed, and the U.S. courts are becoming increasingly reluctant to entertain international class action litigation.
One of the hottest trends in securities litigation in the latter part of the last decade was what became known as foreign-cubed (or “f-cubed”) class actions, securities fraud class actions filed on behalf of foreign investors against foreign companies involving securities traded on a foreign exchange. The trend came to an abrupt halt, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 130 S. Ct. 2869 (2010), holding that section 10(b) of the Securities and Exchange Act does not have an extraterritorial reach and only applies to securities traded on a U.S. exchange or other transactions that occurs within a U.S. state or territory. Although lower court decisions following Morrison, including a recent Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision, may breathe some life back into the idea of litigating a small subset of primarily foreign securities disputes in the U.S. federal courts, Morrison has generally closed the U.S. courts to foreign-cubed class actions.
Another promising avenue for litigating global mass disputes was international arbitration. A developing strategy was for plaintiffs who had signed form arbitration agreements to seek to compel arbitration on behalf of both themselves and others who had signed the same form of agreement. (Several arbitration associations have implemented specific rules for how class arbitrations should be conducted. Here is a link to the AAA Supplemental Rules for Class Arbitration). The Supreme Court put an end to this strategy when it decided the international price-fixing case, Stolt-Nielsen, S.A. v. AnimalFeeds Int’l Corp., 130 S. Ct. 1758 (2010). In Stolt-Nielsen, the Court held that a party to an arbitration agreement could not compel class-wide arbitration unless the parties had expressly agreed to allow class, rather than individual, arbitration.
In the human rights area, the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act has increasingly been used as a tool to litigate international disputes involving alleged violations of international law over the past two decades. Several circuit courts of Appeals have even allowed actions under the ATCA to be brought against private corporations, under the theory that those corporations aided and abetted a foreign government or foreign official in committing human rights abuses. However, the Circuits split on the issue, and the Supreme Court accepted certiorari to resolve the split in the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, No. 10-1491. Following an oral argument held last month, the Supreme Court issued an order directing the parties to submit supplemental briefing to address the extent to which the ATCA should permit the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction at all over acts that took place within a sovereign jurisdiction other than the United States. Questions posed during oral argument, especially by the conservative wing of the Court, suggest skepticism about the allowing U.S. Courts to adjudicate human rights disputes that have nothing to do with the United States.
At the same time that avenues for global mass redress in the U.S. Courts have been closing, doors have been opening in other parts of the world. Class action law continues to develop in Canada and Australia. Israel has a class action procedure that closely mirrors U.S. law. Dozens of other countries in all corners of the world now have procedures allowing at least some form of mass redress. A very recent example is a class action law enacted in Mexico that permits a form of collective litigation that, while quite different from class actions in the United States, provides express mechanisms for seeking collective redress. In 2006, the Netherlands passed a law that allows mass settlements of claims (although it does not provide a procedure for litigating contested class claims), and arguably allows residents of other EU countries to be included. In other countries, the lack of a specific class or collective action procedure has not kept courts from fashioning remedies for mass redress.
The continuing lack of a single global forum for litigating mass disputes and the proliferation of new procedures permitting collective litigation abroad, are likely to have at least one near term practical impact. That is, the development of areas of law dealing with the enforcement of foreign class or collective action judgments. This has already become a reality in a huge environmental contamination case involving the drilling operations of a formal Chevron subsidiary in Ecuador. In 2010, a court in Ecuador entered an $18 million judgment in the case, and proceedings are ongoing in both the U.S. courts and in international arbitration proceedings relating to the enforceability of the judgment.
In a related vein, U.S. courts increasingly find themselves adjudicating disputes under 28 U.S.C. § 1782, which allows litigants discovery in the United States for use in connection with foreign proceedings (see this recent Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision interpreting the statute).
What does this all mean for potential litigants in global disputes? For any company or even small business that does business internationally, these developments highlight the necessity of keeping up with the constant changes in local laws as well as international trends. The procedures that might have been applicable, and arguments that might have been persuasive a year before, may no longer be viable, but new avenues and theories will have almost certainly taken their place.
Daniel Wise of the New York Law Journal has an interesting article out today on a recent New York state court decision involving a complex dispute over assets of former Philippines dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, being held by Merrill Lynch in New York. The court ordered that the funds be paid to satisfy part of a $2 billion judgment awarded to class members in a successful class action filed in federal court in Hawaii under the Alien Tort Claims Act, on behalf of individuals injured by human rights abuses committed by the Marcos regime. The current government of the Philippines claims entitlement of the funds, claiming that it has a sovereign interest.
The same funds were the subject of a federal interpleader action filed by the brokerage to resolve issues over various competing claims to the funds. The United States Supreme Court dismissed that action in 2007 after concluding that the Philippine government and a Philippine commission, who had sovereign immunity from having to participate in the interpleader proceeding, were indispensible parties. The state court faced a similar issue, but interpreting the state joinder rule, it found that the two entities were necessary, but not indispensible parties, which meant that the case could go forward without them.
The cases reflect an intriguing and complicated interplay between a variety of private and governmental interests. The individual class members claim entitlement to a personal remedy for injuries caused by human rights violations of the former Philippine government. The current Philippine government has a sovereign interest in being free from having its rights determined by foreign courts, and it wants to use the assets to fund public programs. The State of New York has an interest in making decisions about disputed funds held within its borders, but one of its courts disagrees with the analysis of the nation’s highest court about the importance of the sovereign interests of a foreign nation over those same funds. In the middle of it all is a bank who probably just doesn’t want to get sued again for giving the money to the wrong party.

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