Alien Tort Statute

 Barrie Sander has law degrees from Cambridge and Leiden, and from September 2012 will be a PhD candidate in International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. In an earlier post, I considered the question of corporate liability under international law in light of the case of Kiobel v Royal Dutch Petroleum (“Kiobel”), which is currently before the US Supreme Court.  Kiobel, a case brought under the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”), concerns claims that various Shell entities (“the respondents”) planned, conspired and facilitated extrajudicial executions, torture and crimes against humanity by Nigeria in the Niger Delta between 1992 and 1995. It had been thought that the question of whether corporations may be sued under the ATS would be the central issue before the Supreme Court in Kiobel. However, during oral argument the Justices became preoccupied with the wider issue of the extraterritorial nature of the ATS. In particular, they focussed on the question  whether US federal courts may rely on the ATS to exercise…