I wrote yesterday about the French Court of Appeals decision holding that French train companies did not violate international law (and particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention) by building a light rail system in Jerusalem, including areas occupied by Jordan before 1967.
The case, PLO v. Alstom, is a perfect foreign coda to the Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel, as it also deals with suits for extraterritorial conduct of multinational corporations (though without the universal jurisdiction twist of Kiobel). It illustrates how the efforts of some American courts to implement international law norms through civil damages remedies is in fact a rather parochial exercise detached from international practice.
1) Most significantly, the Court found that international law does not create liability for corporations. This accords with the view of the Second Circuit in Kiobel – corporate liability was the issue on which cert in Kiobel had been granted, though the case was ultimately decided on extraterritorially grounds. Many who favored corporate liability argued that on this issue, courts should apply not international law, but rather federal common law. In future ATS litigation against companies with some U.S. nexus, the PLO v. Alstom decision will not make plaintiffs’ work easier.
2) The Versailles court also seemed to take a narrow view of aiding-and-abetting liability. The issue is hard to separate from the corporate liability issue, but the Court basically found that even if Israel’s conduct violated international law, the corporation does not incur liability for its involvement.
3) Ironically, the best examples of corporate liability under international law came from ATS cases (where courts had upheld such liability after having been assured of its existence outside ATS cases). Yet the French court brushed off precedents under the ATS by noting that they were merely applications of a “domestic statute” and thus not really international law. There goes global judicial dialogue – or perhaps they heard that the ATS was just federal common law!
4) The Court was pretty dismissive of “soft law” – international guidelines, best practices statements, and so forth, in creating or defining customary norms.
5) I argued recently that the U.S. is particularly attractive to human rights plaintiffs for the same reasons it is attractive to all other plaintiffs, and this cases illustrates this well. Because Alstom was the prevailing party, the Court required Palestinian plaintiffs to cover 60,000 Euros of the defendants’ costs. You don’t get that in a dismissed ATS case.