Cisco Suits on China Rights Abuses to Test Legal Reach

wo lawsuits by three Chinese dissidents and a human rights group accusing Cisco Systems Inc. of abetting imprisonment and torture could have far-reaching impact on how U.S. technology companies conduct business in authoritarian regimes. The lawsuits filed in May and June Both cases could provide answers to an evolving legal question: Can U.S. companies be held liable if foreign governments use their products for repression?

The first lawsuit, filed in May by the Human Rights Law Foundation in Washington in the Federal District Court in San Jose, California, accuses Cisco of designing products to help the Chinese government persecute members of China's banned spiritual group, Falun Gong.

Last Friday, the rights group amended its original complaint, saying it had new evidence that Cisco customized its products specifically to enable the authorities to persecute members of Falun Gong, some of whom were alleged to have been tortured and killed by the Chinese authorities.

The second suit, filed in June in the U.S. District Court in Maryland, says the company was complicit in the arrests and detentions of political writers Du Daobin, Zhou Yuanzhi and Liu Xianbin.

The lawsuits are drawing broad attention from U.S. companies because these are important test cases of the Alien Tort Claims Act, a law dating back to 1789 that accommodates actions in U.S. courts to uphold international law.

Cisco is the world's biggest maker of Internet networking equipment. Both lawsuits name several Cisco executives, including Chief Executive John Chambers.

David Cook, Cisco's communications director for Asia-Pacific, said the company "builds equipment to global standards which facilitate free exchange of information, and we sell the same equipment in China that we sell in other nations worldwide in strict compliance with US government regulations."

But Daniel Ward, the lawyer representing the three dissidents, said that Cisco "built the entire backbone" of China's Golden Shield Project, also known as the Great Firewall -- the cloak of Internet security authorities use to censor the Internet and track opponents of the Chinese government.

He called the project the 21st-century version of the deadly crackdown on the Tiananmen Square...