Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), issued the below statement following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I, which dismissed a lawsuit filed by Falun Gong practitioners that accused Cisco Systems, Inc. of developing and selling technology for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to use to surveil and persecute the Falun Gong movement:

                “All victims of human rights abuses enabled or assisted by U.S. companies overseas deserve their day in court. Every perpetrator of human rights violations must be held to account—especially and including corporations based in the United States—and no legal loophole should be used to shield them.

                “Given the extensive and well-documented evidence that Cisco Systems, Inc.—and other U.S. companies, like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which were exposed at a groundbreaking congressional hearing I chaired—are supplying technologies to facilitate the CCP’s human rights abuses, I am deeply disappointed by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I.

                “The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to limit the applications of the Alien Tort Statue of 1789 and the Torture Victim Protection Act creates a dangerous and disheartening precedent for victims of torture or religious persecution seeking to sue corporations in U.S. courts for aiding and abetting the human rights violations committed against them.

                “I stand firmly with the Falun Gong movement, and I commend them for their courage in taking such a formidable and powerful corporation to court. We must continue to work to hold China accountable on the international stage for its heinous human rights abuses, and I remain committed to fighting for justice for all Falun Gong practitioners, who are harassed, tortured, abused, oppressed, and surveilled at the hands of the CCP.”

                Smith, along with Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) of the House Select Committee on the CCP, authored an October 29^th letter to U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer regarding the matter, urging him to allow the case against Cisco Systems, Inc. to proceed and deny the defendant’s (Cisco’s) petition for a writ of certiorari.

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