Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Falun Gong Lawsuit Against Cisco

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.

Cisco, which denies the allegations in the lawsuit, asked the justices to weigh in. The Trump administration joined the case in support of Cisco.

Falun Gong is a religious movement that began in China about three decades ago. Since then, it has gained a global following, espousing nonviolence and health benefits from its meditative exercises.

The Chinese government banned the group after Falun Gong followers staged a peaceful rally in April 1999 outside the Communist Party leadership’s headquarters in Beijing. The group’s effectiveness at mobilizing and organizing its followers unsettled China’s leaders, and its practitioners have alleged persecution, imprisonment and torture by the government.

The Falun Gong members have accused Cisco Systems under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 federal law that allows foreign nationals to bring lawsuits in U.S. federal courts alleging wrongs committed in violation of international law or U.S. treaties.

They argue the company, which is based in San Jose, Calif., helped the Chinese government to design and develop a censorship and surveillance system that included a database with locations, contact information and other personal information about Falun Gong practitioners. The plaintiffs assert that Cisco did much of this work at its offices in the United States.

The Falun Gong practitioners who brought the lawsuit claim that Cisco’s technology was used by the Chinese government to identify them and subject them to forced conversion and torture.

The court has considered the scope of the statute before. In 2004, the justices heard Sosa v. Álvarez-Machaín, a case that involved the arrest and trial of Humberto Álvarez-Machaín, a Mexican national who had been accused in the 1985 kidnapping and murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent. Mr. Álvarez-Machaín asserted that the D.E.A. had hired several Mexican nationals to capture him, and he argued his abduction violated the law.

In that case, the justices found that the law most likely was originally understood to allow lawsuits under only three specific violations of international norms: the violation of rules allowing safe conduct in other countries, the infringement of the rights of ambassadors and piracy.

Although the Supreme Court has never recognized other causes of action under the statute, lower courts have found many.

The dispute heard on Tuesday also involved the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1991 law that allows lawsuits in U.S. courts against people who participate in torture or extrajudicial killings while acting under the power of a foreign nation.

On Tuesday, the lawyer for the Falun Gong members, Paul L. Hoffman, urged the justices to clear the way for the lawsuit, asserting that Cisco had helped to create “a customized surveillance system” that enabled the Chinese government to target a religious minority for “barbaric treatment.”

Kannon K. Shanmugam, the lawyer for Cisco, argued that allowing a lawsuit to proceed would be “a significant expansion” of the current law and would raise “substantial foreign policy concerns.”

The lawyer for the Trump administration, Curtis E. Gannon, a deputy solicitor general, told the justices that “the lower courts have been too permissive” by allowing such lawsuits to proceed.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, two of the court’s liberals, appeared sharply skeptical of arguments by Cisco and the Trump administration.

A decision in the case is expected by late June or early July.