WASHINGTON—Two prominent Republican lawmakers are calling on the Trump administration to side with a lawsuit accusing Cisco of aiding a brutal persecution in China.
In a letter dated Oct. 29, Reps. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who respectively lead the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the House Select Committee on Chinese Communist Party, urged the administration to press the Supreme Court so the case could go to trial.
Practitioners of Falun Gong filed the case in 2011, alleging that the California tech giant has contributed in no small part to designing and building China’s vast surveillance network, exacerbating the sweeping eradication campaign that the regime launched against the faith group in 1999.
The resulting product is Golden Shield, a platform accessible nationwide in China that allows the regime to identify and monitor Falun Gong practitioners in real time, enabling their arrest and torture, the plaintiffs said. According to the complaint, the system also keeps detailed profiles of suspected and known Falun Gong practitioners, including their location, family members, and contacts.
The spiritual discipline Falun Gong features the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It attracted somewhere between 70 million to 100 million practitioners in the 1990s. In the nationwide persecution, many have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting.
“The allegation that an American tech company custom-designed a tool to facilitate the violent persecution of a religious minority by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a serious one. We believe the plaintiffs deserve the chance to prove their claims,” the lawmakers wrote to the chief U.S. Supreme Court litigator, D. John Sauer.
Sauer represents the U.S. government position in cases before the Supreme Court, which is reviewing a challenge from Cisco seeking to dismiss the case. The Supreme Court has sought the views from Sauer, who will file a brief by early next year.
Smith and Moolenaar said Cisco’s argument that the litigation harms U.S. foreign policy “gets things entirely backwards.”
“Members of Congress have been clear that American companies must not be complicit in furthering the CCP’s human rights abuses,” they wrote, pointing to a congressional hearing in 2006 where Smith and other lawmakers questioned a Cisco executive over the role of its technology in aiding abuses.
One Cisco marketing PowerPoint, leaked in 2008, showed the company pitching the Golden Shield Project for monitoring public network information security, with one priority being to “combat ‘Falun Gong.’”
In the complaint, more than a dozen Falun Gong practitioners, including Americans, described arrests and harsh torment they said Cisco’s technology has aided and abetted.
“This case is a tragic example of the real-life implications of a U.S. company producing technology for the CCP—widespread persecution, harassment, intimidation, and even torture,” Smith told The Epoch Times.
The lawmakers’ letter cited a recent Associated Press investigation into Cisco and several other U.S. tech companies, which found that they were “playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known.”
“These revelations make clear that litigation is one necessary tool to secure compliance with American policy,” the letter states.
At the center of the case is whether a U.S. company like Cisco should be held liable for supplying domestically-developed technology that furthers abuses on foreign soil.
In July 2023, the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed a lower district court’s dismissal of the case and found the plaintiffs’ allegations sufficient to proceed. Cisco now wants the Supreme Court to toss the suit.
Cisco, in a statement to The Epoch Times, said it has “a longstanding commitment to uphold and respect human rights for all people.” The company said that “if the 2023 ruling of the Ninth Circuit Court stands, it opens the floodgates for suits against U.S. corporations merely for legal exports of off-the-shelf goods and services.”
Terri Marsh, executive director of the Human Rights Law Foundation and a chief lawyer for the plaintiffs, thanked the lawmakers for their support.
“Representatives Smith and Moolenaar forcefully demonstrate how the Cisco litigation advances key congressional policies,” she told The Epoch Times.
Marsh said the case will “further the Trump Administration’s stand against the use of American technology to support China’s military and its technology-enabled authoritarianism.”
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