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Article

27 Oct 2014

Author:
Sarah A. Altschuller, Foley Hoag's Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law Alien Tort Case Development: The Second Circuit Assesses the Appropriate Focus of Jurisdictional Inquiries

On October 23, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in Mastafa v. Chevron Corp., a case filed against Chevron Corp. and BNP Paribas pursuant to the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”). The court upheld the District Court’s dismissal of the plaintiffs’ complaint…[T]he court held that the “focus” of the jurisdictional inquiry in ATS cases must be the specific conduct that allegedly violated the law of nations and where that conduct occurred. The case involves allegations that Chevron and BNP Paribas aided and abetted human rights abuses by representatives of the Government of Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s regime…The court stated that a company’s U.S. citizenship was irrelevant to the jurisdictional analysis, explicitly disagreeing with the Fourth Circuit’s identification of corporate citizenship as a relevant factor in determining whether claims touch and concern the United States in the Al Shimari v. CACI decision.