But recently, lawyers have found a way to seek at least a modicum of justice for victims. The Alien Tort Claims Act, a 215-year-old law originally passed to prosecute pirates for crimes committed on the high seas, allows non-citizens to sue any individual or corporation present on U.S. soil.
Human rights lawyers have pursued 100 cases under ATCA since 1980. Defendants have included former high-ranking government and military officials from El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Paraguay, the Philippines (including ex-president Ferdinand Marcos himself), Indonesia, Bosnia, Ethiopia and elsewhere. And although the law can only be used to pursue monetary damages rather than prison time, it has often resulted in victims being awarded millions--and in the perpetrators sometimes fleeing the country rather than paying up.
Ten years ago, victims began using the act to go after corporate profiteers, too: It was thanks to ATCA, for example, that Nazi holocaust survivors were able to seek redress from the Swiss banks and companies that profited from the slave labor of concentration camp internees during World War II.
But Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department has set its sights on the act, claiming in a brief last year [2002] that the law threatens "important foreign policy interests" associated with the war on terrorism. Yet hardly a word has been written in the mainstream media about the Bush administration's attack on the one legal recourse left in the United States for victims to seek redress for human rights violations.
Source: "Ashcroft goes after 200-year-old human rights law," Jim Lobe, www.oneworld.net and Asheville Global Report, May 19, 2003.
Censored 2005 : The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored)
by Peter Phillips
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