U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and U.S Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) today introduced the Alien Tort Statute Clarification Act, legislation which will expressly state that the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) applies extraterritorially.  This clarification will ensure that foreign national victims can hold perpetrators within the jurisdiction of the United States accountable for human rights violations that occur abroad.

“It is imperative that we treat international human rights as not just an aspirational concept, but a legal reality,” Durbin said.  “The bill Senator Brown and I are proposing will clarify Congress’s intent to ensure that human rights violators within the jurisdiction of our courts can be held to account by their victims regardless of where the abuses occurred.”

“For decades, corporations have closed down production in Ohio and outsourced to the lowest global bidder.  And these corporations would have you believe they are not liable on civil grounds for forced labor – including child labor – in their global supply chains, after arguing at the Supreme Court for a contrived loophole,” Brown said.  “To eradicate forced labor from global supply chains, we need to clarify that the Alien Tort Statute always applied to cases abroad, as Congress intended.”...