{"id":26253,"date":"2026-06-24T14:13:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T14:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/24\/us-supreme-court-ends-lawsuit-alleging-cisco-helped-china-pursue-falun-gong-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T14:13:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T14:13:05","slug":"us-supreme-court-ends-lawsuit-alleging-cisco-helped-china-pursue-falun-gong-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/06\/24\/us-supreme-court-ends-lawsuit-alleging-cisco-helped-china-pursue-falun-gong-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"US supreme court ends lawsuit alleging Cisco helped China pursue Falun Gong – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suit \u2060alleged California-based company developed technology that allowed China to surveil members of movement
\u2060The US supreme court<\/a> further limited the reach of a federal law used to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses committed abroad, as it issued a ruling on Tuesday ending a lawsuit by \u2060members of the Falun Gong \u2060movement accusing Cisco Systems \u200bof facilitating religious persecution in China.
The justices reversed a lower court\u2019s decision that had breathed new life into the 2011 lawsuit, which was brought under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789. The suit \u2060had alleged that Cisco knowingly developed technology that allowed China\u2019s government to surveil and persecute Falun Gong members.
The Alien Tort Statute had been dormant for nearly two centuries before lawyers began using it in the 1980s to bring international \u2060human rights cases in US courts. The Cisco case posed the question of whether the law creates liability for corporations that \u201caid and abet\u201d human \u200brights abuses, a form of what is called accomplice liability.
The lawsuit \u200caccused San Jose, California-based Cisco of knowingly \u200cdesigning and implementing the \u201cGolden Shield\u201d, an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist party to target dissidents. The plaintiffs said China used \u200cthe system to track and then torture Falun Gong members.
Cisco called the allegations unfounded and offensive.
Donald Trump\u2019s administration sided with Cisco in the case.
The Human Rights Law Foundation, a non-profit organization in Washington, sued Cisco on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2014, saying the alleged conduct was not sufficiently connected to the United States for the case to proceed.
The lawsuit stalled for many years, in part because of a series of supreme court decisions since 2013 limiting the Alien Tort Statute\u2019s \u200creach, making it more difficult to hold US corporations legally liable for human rights abuses.
Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, was banned by China\u2019s government in 1999 after thousands of members appeared at the central leadership compound \u200bin Beijing in silent protest. The group has called for people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist party. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning US media outlet called the Epoch Times that has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist party and supports Trump.
The San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals revived the case in 2023 and allowed it to move toward discovery, the evidence-gathering phase before a trial.
The ninth circuit decided that \u2060the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged \u201cthat Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng (crackdown) of Falun Gong with awareness \u200bthat the international law violations of torture, arbitrary \u200bdetention, disappearance and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take \u200bplace\u201d.
The supreme court in the 2013 and 2018 cases limited the ability of plaintiffs to sue corporations in US \u200bcourts under the Alien Tort Statute \u200cfor overseas human rights \u200bviolations. The court said in those \u200brulings that there needed to be a strong connection between the alleged conduct and actions that took place in the United States.
In a 2021 opinion, the US supreme court threw out a lawsuit accusing Cargill Inc and a Nestl\u00e9 SA subsidiary of knowingly helping perpetuate slavery at C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire cocoa farms, ruling that the plaintiffs did not show that any of the relevant conduct took place within the United States.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suit \u2060alleged California-based company developed technology that allowed China to surveil members of movement\u2060The US supreme court further limited the reach of a federal law used to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses committed abroad, as it issued a ruling on Tuesday ending a lawsuit by \u2060members of the Falun Gong \u2060movement accusing Cisco […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}