Tech giant Cisco is facing a continued legal challenge in California state court over allegations that it has aided human rights abuses in China.
Seventeen plaintiffs, including U.S. citizens, filed a lawsuit alleging the San Jose company helped the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) build a sophisticated surveillance system to persecute a faith group that the regime has sought to eradicate.
The plaintiffs are Falun Gong practitioners, a spiritual practice that emphasizes truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, along with meditative exercises.
The Chinese regime began an all-out campaign targeting the group in 1999, subjecting the practitioners to slave labor, long prison sentences, and torture in a bid to make them renounce their beliefs.
Cisco’s Golden Shield was an instrumental tool in facilitating this abuse, the plaintiffs alleged.
According to the plaintiffs, it is a multi-tiered apparatus allowing the authorities to track, identify, profile, and interrogate Falun Gong practitioners, with information on each target stored in a database and constantly updated.
The lawsuit, filed in August, marks he latest efforts after a long-running battle to seek corporate liability over human rights abuses. The Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint on October 30th.
Thirteen of the plaintiffs first filed a lawsuit against Cisco in 2011 asserting multiple federal and state claims. One of the federal statutes they invoked was the Alien Tort Statute, which at the time had been interpreted to let non-U.S. citizens seek remedies in U.S. courts for international human rights violations.
In June, the Supreme Court sided with Cisco, effectively closing the door to corporate human rights accountability suits under the the Alien Tort Statute in federal courts.
But while the ruling narrowed the law, attorneys on the case said victims still have ways to pursue accountability.
“The Supreme Court decision found that the Alien Tort Statute did not include human rights cases that were not about piracy, safe conducts, or ambassadors. That does not have any bearing on whether the state courts can hear cases that they have traditionally heard such as tort cases,” Catherine Sweetser, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, told The Epoch Times.
Of those who joined the new lawsuit, three live in California.
They include Zhang Yuhua, who, while in China, used circumvention software to access overseas websites to download Falun Gong-related materials.
In 2002, the lawsuit said, Chinese security detected her internet traffic, broke into her home, and sentenced her to four years in prison. She was arrested twice in the following years, suffering sleep deprivation, force feeding, and injection of unknown substances, according to the complaint.
The complaint alleged that Golden Shield had included her name in its database, resulting in ongoing surveillance of her activities.
It noted that in early 2013, after Zhang moved to a new place, a surveillance camera appeared near the entrance of her residential building, enabling the police to monitor her around the clock.
Similarly, the complaint said, Chinese police tracked down plaintiff Wu Jiahao. The authorities regularly cited Wu’s internet activity during interrogation, tortured him during his four-year prison sentence, forced him to watch videos vilifying his belief, and severely restricted his access to food, drink, and the restroom, according to the filing.
Surveillance and harassment continued after his release, with Party officials going to his home to make threats and directing his landlords to evict him, the filing said.
“There are a lot of people who think that the Golden Shield is just an internet censorship software. It is not,” Can Sun, another case attorney, told The Epoch Times.
The legal process is “a long and difficult road,” one of the original plaintiffs from 2011 told The Epoch Times. But given the grave allegations at the heart of this case, the plaintiff said it is important to persist.
Cisco didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
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