[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Victim's Rights
On March 30, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about whether victims of terrible human rights abuses committed outside this country should be able to seek relief in U.S. courts. For a quarter century, our courts have consistently upheld the right to pursue such claims. Now the Bush administration seeks to gut the law used for this purpose. The case before the Court, Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, involves the claim by a Mexican doctor that his arrest and detention, and subsequent transfer against his will from Mexico to the United States, was a tort "committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States." That language comes from the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), part of the original Judiciary Act of 1789. The law grants federal district courts "original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only," where that constitutes a violation of "the law of nations.
The administration does not merely object to Dr. Alvarez-Machain's claim; it attacks use of the Act for any human rights violation, however heinous. If the Supreme Court agrees, victims who have no other legal recourse will no longer be able to use the law to try to hold their abusers accountable. Prior administrations did not share the aversion of the current one to the use of the statute as a human rights tool. The Carter administration filed a memorandum in support of the plaintiffs in the landmark case of Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, where the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held in 1980 that the ATCA provided a remedy for torture "in violation of the law of nations.
When President George H.W. Bush signed the companion Torture Victim Protection Act into law in 1992, he expressed concern that U.S. courts might become engaged in "sensitive disputes" involving other countries, but added that "we must maintain and strengthen our commitment to ensuring that human rights are respected everywhere......
