Supreme Court Rules Apartheid Victims Can Sue US Corps

By Cernig

I wonder why I had to turn to Murdoch's British press oulet for this story?

Thousands of South Africans who suffered under apartheid won the right yesterday to sue a number of companies, including BP, Citigroup and Ford, for allegedly helping to perpetrate human rights abuses.

The US Supreme Court ruled that three class actions can use the American legal system to sue approximately 50 international corporations who they believe “knowingly aided and abetted the South African military and security forces”. Some legal experts have estimated that the companies could be sued for as much as $400 billion.

The corporations that could be facing a court challenge in the United States also include ExxonMobil, UBS, Deutsche Bank, General Motors, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America and General Electric.

After all, this is a potentially huge story. If the plaintiffs can prove that, for example, a motor company knew that lorries that it sold in South Africa would be used as armoured vehicles to destroy townships or a technology company sold computer equipment and software that would be used to operate a racial identification system and thus knowingly helped the old South African commit atrocities, then those companies would be on the hook for hundreds of billions in damages for at a time when the nation is heading into a recession. Nevermind the possibility that one or more companies might defend their actions by saying "but the Reagan government told us it would be OK".

If you had shares in one of those companies - and you might well do as part of your retirement planning - wouldn't you want to know about this? Wouldn't you expect FOX business, the WSJ and other US media outlets to be covering it?

Speaking to The Times, Michael Hausfeld, the lead counsel for the Khulumani group, which is based in Washington, said: “We want a legal acknowledgement of accountability, that these international corporations knowingly helped the regime violate human rights.

“A ruling in our favour would have two possible impacts. It would force the companies to pay compensation to those who were injured as a consequence of the abuses they suffered. It would also trigger a change in corporate governance.”

...The American and foreign corporations have appealed to the Supreme Court. The Bush Administration and business groups have supported their appeal.

Because heaven forbid a Republican administration ever increased corporate governance so as to prevent violations of human rights.

Comments

[anderson]

Either that, or everyone is pretty confident that such massive awards will never happen. Sure, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of allowing the lawsuits to go forward, and in that they finally can look somewhat less than biased toward big-business as they have demonstrated so far. But it's a feint that makes SCOTUS look much better than we know they really are.

The crunch decision will come if and when those lawsuits crawl their way back to the Supremes. And then we see just how magnanimous the Big Bench really is. I suspect in such cases, knowing complicity will be extremely hard to prove.

It'll be the same as how Reagan got off: well, I don't know ... I just don't remember.