"Human Rights and the Court"
The New York Times Editorial
July 3, 2004

The Supreme Court has upheld an important law that offers victims of torture, genocide, slavery and war crimes worldwide a day in court, and a shot at justice. The law, the arcane Alien Tort Claims Act, was originally written to fight piracy in 1789, but it has been used by foreigners to sue in American courts for overseas human rights violations.

Holocaust survivors used the act to pry damages from the Swiss banks that held the assets of Nazi victims. In Myanmar, people who say they are victims of slave labor are using it to sue an American company involved in a gas pipeline project. Victims of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses are now suing the prison's private contractors under the act.

Human rights advocates rely on the law to adjudicate a wide range of crimes that might otherwise never get to court. International businesses hate the law and consider it a license for American courts to stray from their jurisdiction and hold them accountable for the sins of unsavory foreign governments. The Bush administration agrees.

But in its first ruling on the act, the Supreme Court properly sided with the cause of human rights. Justice David Souter's opinion, in a 6-to-3 decision on the fate of the act, tries to strike a balance by upholding it but limiting its applicability to those crimes of universal jurisdiction that nations have agreed are particularly heinous. The actual case before the court — a lawsuit by a Mexican doctor illegally detained for a few hours during an investigation into the death of an federal Drug Enforcement Administration officer — didn't come close to meeting that threshold, and was thrown out.

The Supreme Court also said that lower courts should be sensitive to how cases could affect American foreign policy. Judges should treat such claims warily. The Bush administration is too quick to argue that the application of the act will impede the war on terror and poison relations with friendly governments.