🚨JUST In : TRUMP STUNNED SUPREME COURT RULES 8-1 THAT HE CAN… SHOCKING RULING SENDS WAVES THROUGH WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON — In a major ruling curtailing the reach of the federal judiciary over corporate activities abroad, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6–3 on Tuesday that foreign plaintiffs cannot use federal courts to hold American companies liable for aiding and abetting overseas human rights atrocities.
The decision in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe shields multinational corporations, particularly technology and infrastructure firms, from sweeping civil liability arising from doing business with authoritarian foreign governments.
Writing for the conservative majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett held that the 1789 Alien Tort Statute (ATS) does not grant federal judges the power to craft new private rights of action, while the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (TVPA) contains no statutory basis for secondary aiding-and-abetting liability. Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh.
“Today, we close the door that Sosa cracked and hold that courts may not create new causes of action for violations of international norms,” Barrett wrote, citing the court’s 2004 precedent in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain. “We also hold that the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, which contains an express cause of action, does not provide for aiding-and-abetting liability.”
The litigation began when practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual group banned and violently suppressed by Beijing, filed suit against San Jose-based Cisco Systems and several senior executives. The plaintiffs alleged that Chinese security forces subjected them to mass surveillance, unlawful detention, and severe physical torture using the “Golden Shield”—China’s nationwide digital surveillance architecture.
According to the complaint, Cisco engineers customized hardware and network surveillance modules specifically to track, catalog, and locate Falun Gong members, with the knowledge that security agencies would use the system to facilitate arbitrary detentions and abuse.
Although a California federal district court initially dismissed the suit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit revived the claims, holding that both statutes permitted secondary liability against U.S. corporations that knowingly assist in gross violations of customary international law. Tuesday’s ruling flatly rejected that theory.
Grounding the decision in constitutional separation of powers, Barrett wrote that creating civil remedies for money damages is an exclusively legislative function. Permitting judges to fashion common-law tort claims out of evolving international standards, the majority held, risks judicial entanglement in foreign affairs—a domain constitutionally assigned to the president and Congress.
The outcome aligns with the position taken by the Department of Justice. The Solicitor General’s office had urged the court to restrict cross-border litigation, warning that subjecting domestic businesses to lawsuits over foreign crackdowns disrupts sensitive diplomatic channels, invites reciprocal legal retaliations abroad, and undermines technological commerce.
Corporate defense attorneys celebrated the ruling as an end to decades of jurisdictional uncertainty, during which multinational corporations routinely spent tens of millions of dollars defending against claims of complicity in foreign state abuses.
The court’s liberal wing issued sharp dissents, warning that the majority had effectively granted immunity to domestic enterprises that knowingly profit from atrocities committed on foreign soil.
In the primary dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, argued that the TVPA’s core language—authorizing suits against anyone who “subjects an individual to torture”—plainly encompasses those who knowingly facilitate that abuse under long-standing common-law tort principles.
“Because the plain text of this statute includes individuals who aid and abet the victim’s torture, I would affirm the Ninth Circuit’s judgment on this score as well,” Sotomayor wrote, arguing that the majority had artificially narrowed a congressional mandate.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred in part and dissented in part, joined by Kagan, agreeing on certain jurisdictional limits under the ATS while arguing that the TVPA was expressly designed by Congress to offer a federal forum for victims of state brutality.
The ruling represents the culmination of a multi-decade effort by the court to restrict transnational human rights litigation, following precedents in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. (2013) and Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe (2021). By foreclosing secondary aiding-and-abetting liability under both statutes, the court has firmly established that foreign victims of sovereign abuse cannot pursue U.S. corporate suppliers unless Congress expressly passes legislation allowing it.