1/ As a circuit court judge, Brett Kavanaugh dissented in a 2011 case filed by Indonesian villagers in the province of Aceh who accused Exxon Mobil of letting private security forces murder, torture, and abuse local residents on company property. cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opini…
2/ The case was filed by the HR group International Rights Advocates in 2001, citing the 1789 Alien Tort Statute, a law used by other victims of HR abuses overseas to seek civil redress in US courts against corporations or individuals resident in the US. iradvocates.org/case/asia-indo…
3/ The legal argument was that Exxon was responsible for crimes committed by Indonesian security forces working for it on its property. A majority of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decided that Exxon Mobil could be held legally accountable if the charges were proven true.
4/ Exxon Mobil had worked closely with Indonesian security forces in the northern Sumatran province of Aceh, where it operated the largest gas and oil field in the country and faced opposition from a long-running independence movement subject to vicious state repression.
4/ Kavanaugh basically argued in his dissent that the Alien Tort Statute could not be used in this case if there was no international tribunal where the Acehnese victims could find redress. He argued further that an adverse ruling could “negatively affect US Indonesian relations”
5/ And potentially the so-called war on terror. I will leave the fine grained analysis to others, but here Kavanaugh argues that people murdered, “beaten, burned, shocked with cattle prods, kicked” and abused by a corporation’s employees had no redress. google.com/amp/s/mobile.r…
I would be interested to know from other human rights lawyers what this suggest about Kavanaugh’s views on corporate responsibility and accountability for abuses.
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