Standard behind US Court dismissal of Alien Tort case against Occidental & AirScan “sufficiently vague for corporations to hide behind”, says journalist
"Suing companies for atrocities has never been harder. Thanks, Supreme Court!", 18 Nov 2014 [Subscription required]
On Nov. 12 [2014], the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals…ruled…in Mujica v. AirScan that the families of the victims of a…1998, cluster bomb attack on…Santo Domingo, Colombia, could not make claims against two American companies...Occidental Petroleum and AirScan...allegedly complicit in the attack...The Colombian helicopters that bombed Santo Domingo did so to protect the Caño-Limón pipeline, owned by Occidental, according to the plaintiffs. Occidental allegedly provided financial support to the Colombian military, [and gave] it office space to plan the…raid, the plaintiffs said…[I]n Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co...Chief Justice John Roberts...[said]..."even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States...they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application."...Now, that "touch and concern" standard has returned...[Judge] Bybee wrote that the [Alien Tort Statute] didn't apply [in this case] because the…claims…failed to "touch and concern" the [US] with sufficient force...Relying on a standard as ill-defined as touch and concern, it seems, creates language sufficiently vague for corporations to hide behind. [Also refers to Exxon Mobil, Cisco, Shell]