A team of Foley Hoag International Litigation and Arbitration attorneys submitted two separate amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court case Cisco Systems, Inc. v. Doe I, in support of the Respondents, urging the court to continue to recognize aiding and abetting as a form of liability under international law for purposes of the Alien Tort Statute.
The first brief, filed on behalf of former U.S. Ambassadors-at-Large for War Crimes Issues/Global Criminal Justice and Prosecutors of International Crimes, argues that aiding and abetting is “among the most firmly established norms of international law,” recognized continuously since the Nuremberg trials following World War II, and applied by legal systems worldwide. It further argues that failure to recognize aiding and abetting as a form of liability would undermine the foreign policy interests of the United States.
The second brief was filed on behalf of Guernica37 Centre for International Justice, an international non-profit legal organization that pursues accountability for human rights violations and other egregious acts. It argues that that Continental (Civil law) legal systems uniformly recognize the civil liability of aiders and abettors as part of the general principle of fault-based liability. The brief traces the roots of the concept in Roman law, in which Roman praetors considered aiders and abettors to be liable for “giving cause,” through to the modern age, showing that failure to recognize this form of liability would place the United States at odds with legal systems across the world.
The Foley Hoag team responsible for the U.S. Ambassadors and International Prosecutors brief included Christina Hioureas, Andrew Loewenstein, Nicholas Renzler, Daniel Zaleznik and Hannah Sweeney, with support from Mateo Franco Aguirre, Taleen Khleifat, Isabella Malmqvist and Jennifer Schoppmann. Hioureas, the Department Co-Chair, filed the brief on behalf of Guernica37, alongside Guernica37 co-counsel Almudena Bernabeu, Michael Reed Hurtado, Saúl Castro Fernández and Madelaine G. Altman.