Unocal to settle human rights lawsuits
This is old news, but some readers
missed it. If the plaintiffs had won, it would have been an astounding
precedent for the use of U.S. courts to ajudicate actions that take
place in a foreign jurisdiction. The controversial attempt to use
this ancient law for this new purpose is a major story in the
area of
corporate social responsibility. What’s more, it involves 200 year-old
pirates. The law will certainly be back in the news in
2005. For a discussion of the Alien Tort Claims Act, see the January Newsletter at www.csrpolicies.org.
Dec. 13, 2004 (MSNBC) LOS ANGELES – Oil giant Unocal Corp. has reached
an agreement in principle to settle human rights lawsuits involving
allegations of enslaved labor during a 1990s pipeline project in
Southeast Asia, a company spokesman said. The lawsuits maintained that
El Segundo-based Unocal should be held liable for the alleged
enslavement of villagers by soldiers during construction of a natural
gas pipeline in the 1990s in Myanmar…
The federal case, which relies on the 1789 Alien Tort Claims Act that
was originally enacted to prosecute pirates, was reinstated in 2002 by
the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled
that certain types of cases involving violations of international law
could be pursued in federal courts under the obscure act.