Jesner v Arab Bank: The US Supreme Court Forecloses on Corporate Accountability for Human Rights Abuses

On 24 April 2018, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Jesner v. Arab Bank. This is the latest in a string of lawsuits to reach the highest court in the United States brought against a non-American multinational corporation for serious human rights abuses committed beyond the borders of the US under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS). Coincidentally, this date was also the 5th anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory disaster in Bangladesh that led to the deaths of 1134 people, mostly garment workers. While the Rana Plaza disaster led to a wave of increased public awareness of corporate culpability for human rights abuses and some progressive regulatory efforts to curtail them, the US Supreme Court’s Jesner judgment stands in opposition to that. In a remarkable decision, the majority in Jesner ignored or overturned its own recent decisions and denied the ATS’s applicability to corporations. While the implications of Jesner are yet to filter through the US court system, it seems almost certain that it will foreclose all human rights abuse cases against foreign corporations pending in US courts brought under the ATS and likely those against US-based corporations too.