Corporate Responsibility Under the Alien Tort Statute ─ Enforcement of International Law Through US Torts Law

After it was first passed in 1789 as part of the Judiciary Act, the Alien Tort Statute fell largely into disuse for some two centuries until a spate of cases involving suits against former dictators and military officials who had fled to the United States following the removal of governments in their home country for violations of international law, usually torture. A second wave of litigation, following on the 2004 Supreme Court case Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, involves suits against transnational corporations and many are still unresolved. In this volume, Koebele (a practicing lawyer in an international law firm in Brussels, Belgium) seeks to determine whether and to what extent transnational corporations are regulated by the Alien Tort Statute. Following a general overview of the Statute and its human rights litigation, he addresses which international norms are actionable and how they can be determined, examining the issues of actionability standards, international criminal law, civil and political rights, labor standards, and environmental destruction. He then analyzes whether and what kind of corporate contribution to a given violation of international law suffices to incur corporate liability. Finally, he explores the possible defenses and limitations available to transnational corporations in Alien Tort Statute litigation. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michael Koebele is a practising lawyer in an international law firm in Brussels. Before joining private practice, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.