Summary: US Supreme Court reverses 9th Circuit ruling on Cisco case Lawsuit alleged Cisco enabled Golden Shield surveillance system Alien Tort Statute limits corporate liability for overseas abuses The U.S. Supreme Court further limited the reach of a federal law used to hold corporations liable for human rights abuses committed abroad, as it issued a ruling on Tuesday ending a lawsuit by members of the Falun Gong movement accusing Cisco Systems of facilitating religious persecution in China. The justices reversed a lower court's decision that had breathed new life into the 2011 lawsuit, which was brought under the Alien Tort Statute of 1789. The suit had alleged that Cisco knowingly developed technology that allowed China's government to surveil and persecute Falun Gong members. The Alien Tort Statute had been dormant for nearly two centuries before lawyers began using it in the 1980s to bring international human rights cases in U.S. courts. The Cisco case posed the question of whether the law creates liability for corporations that "aid and abet" human rights abuses, a form of what is called accomplice liability. The lawsuit accused San Jose, California-based Cisco of knowingly designing and implementing the "Golden Shield," an internet surveillance system used by the Chinese Communist Party to target dissidents. The plaintiffs said China used the system to track and then torture Falun Gong members. Cisco called the allegations unfounded and offensive. President Donald Trump's administration sided with Cisco in the case. The Human Rights Law Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Washington, sued Cisco on behalf of a group of Falun Gong members. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2014, saying the alleged conduct was not sufficiently connected to the United States for the case to proceed. The lawsuit stalled for many years, in part because of a series of Supreme Court decisions since 2013 limiting the Alien Tort Statute's reach, making it more difficult to hold U.S. corporations legally liable for human rights abuses. Falun Gong, founded in China in 1992, was banned by China's government in 1999 after thousands of members appeared at the central leadership compound in Beijing in silent protest. The group has called for people to renounce the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Falun Gong members founded a right-leaning U.S. media outlet called The Epoch Times that has been heavily critical of the Chinese Communist Party and supports Trump. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived the case in 2023 and allowed it to move toward discovery, the evidence-gathering phase before a trial. The 9th Circuit decided that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged "that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the douzheng (crackdown) of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place." The Supreme Court in 2013 and 2018 cases limited the ability of plaintiffs to sue corporations in U.S. courts under the Alien Tort Statute for overseas human rights violations. The court said in those rulings that there needed to be a strong connection between the alleged conduct and actions that took place in the United States. In a 2021 opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a lawsuit accusing Cargill Inc and a Nestle SA subsidiary of knowingly helping perpetuate slavery at Ivory Coast cocoa farms, ruling that the plaintiffs did not show that any of the relevant conduct took place within the United States. Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham

Summary: US Supreme Court rules 6-3 for ExxonMobil Exxon claims over $1 billion for seized Cuban assets Helms-Burton Act Title III enables lawsuits against Cuba The U.S. Supreme Court made it easier on Tuesday for U.S. companies to seek compensation from Cuba's government for property seized decades ago by former leader Fidel Castro's government, ruling in favor of ExxonMobil in its lawsuit against Cuban state-owned firm Corporación CIMEX. In a 6-3 decision, the court said a legal defense called foreign sovereign immunity, which generally prohibits U.S. lawsuits against foreign governments and their agents, is not available in cases like the one Exxon brought against CIMEX under a 1996 U.S. law called the Helms-Burton Act. The court's six conservative justices were in the majority, while its three liberal justices dissented from the ruling. The Supreme Court reversed a lower court's 2024 ruling that CIMEX could invoke the sovereign immunity defense. The decision removes a major obstacle Exxon faced in its 2019 lawsuit that accused CIMEX of unlawfully using a refinery and service stations that once belonged to Standard Oil, Exxon's corporate predecessor. The case will return to a lower court for further deliberations on CIMEX's potential liability. A Helms-Burton Act provision called Title III permits lawsuits to be filed in U.S. courts against anyone who "traffics" in property confiscated by Cuba's communist government after the 1959 revolution that brought Castro to power. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration supported Exxon's appeal to the Supreme Court. U.S.-CUBA TENSIONS The ruling was issued ​at a rancorous time in U.S.-Cuban relations. The United States on May 20 brought murder charges against former Cuban President Raúl Castro, Fidel's younger brother, in a major escalation in Trump's pressure campaign against Cuba's government. Under Trump, the United States has effectively imposed a blockade on Cuba by threatening sanctions on countries ⁠supplying it with fuel, triggering power outages and exacerbating its worst crisis in decades. Exxon's suit involved Fidel Castro's confiscation of all of the U.S. energy company's Cuban oil and gas assets in 1959, which represented a loss valued at $70 million at the time. Exxon's current claim is now valued at more than $1 billion because of interest and the potential for enhanced damages. According to Exxon, its assets were transferred to CIMEX, Cuba's largest state-owned conglomerate. CIMEX continues to hold and profit from the confiscated property. Exxon's lawsuit was part of a flood of about 40 lawsuits filed under the Helms-Burton Act in 2019 and 2020 because of a change in U.S. policy toward Cuba during Trump's first term. When it passed the Helms-Burton Act, Congress authorized the U.S. president to suspend Title III on national security grounds. The provision was then suspended by three presidents seeking to avoid diplomatic conflicts with allies like Canada and Spain whose companies have invested in Cuba. Trump lifted that suspension in 2019. Lower court rulings had made it difficult for U.S. companies to prevail in such cases, with most lawsuits being dismissed on jurisdictional or procedural grounds. CRUISE DISPUTE The decision was one of two issued by the Supreme Court this year in cases involving the Helms-Burton Act and Cuba. In the other case, the court delivered a setback on May 21 to four American cruise operators that contested $440 million in combined judgments in litigation brought by a U.S. company called Havana Docks Corporation accusing them of unlawfully using docks in Cuba that it built and were later ​seized. The justices set aside a lower court's decision to throw out the judgments ‌against Carnival, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, Royal Caribbean Cruises and MSC Cruises that were awarded to Havana Docks. The Supreme Court's decision sent the case back to the lower court for it to consider other defenses offered by the cruise lines. (Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)

Summary: U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issues order Trump administration's plan to cut CFPB workforce by two-thirds blocked Justice Department's motion to resume cuts rejected by appeals court   On June 19, a federal appeals court blocked the Trump administration's plans to immediately slash the workforce at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by about two-thirds, delivering a setback to the White House's protracted efforts to shrink the consumer watchdog. The order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came in response to a revised plan the Justice Department submitted in late March following repeated legal defeats over its plans to decimate if not eliminate the CFPB. The appeals court had been reviewing the administration's appeal of a March 2025 injunction by a federal district court judge which temporarily barred the mass terminations. The Justice Department, which previously tried to cut up to 90 percent of employees, had argued that it should be permitted to carry out its new plan immediately. It also argued that the case should be returned to the district judge with a 45-day deadline to reassess the injunction. The appeals court granted the administration's motion to return the case to the district court, but rejected the requests to resume staff cuts or impose a deadline on the district judge. The CFPB was created by Congress after the 2008 financial crash to police consumer financial products. Trump and other high-ranking officials have called for the agency ​to be abolished, accusing it of being a politicized burden on free enterprise. Democrats and agency defenders say damaging ​the agency amounts to ​a giveaway to ⁠industry at the expense of consumers. Barred legally from enacting the most drastic actions, the administration has taken other measures to weaken the agency. In May, the agency said it would reassign all staff to its Washington headquarters, a move likely to drive resignations. Earlier this month, Trump nominated a vocal CFPB critic to head the agency moving forward. (Reporting by Kenrick Cai in San Francisco; Editing by Don Durfee and Andrea Ricci)