The Undergraduate Law Review at UC San Diego

28 U.S.C. § 1350, dubbed the “Alien Tort Statute” (ATS), was part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and grants United States federal courts original jurisdiction over tort cases committed by aliens against other aliens. An alien in this instance is an individual who is not a citizen or national of the United States. For almost 200 years, the law was rarely used, until 1976 when Filartiga v. Pena-Irala created a precedent which turned the ATS into a tool for global human rights. In the coming three decades, the ATS was used by aliens who were victims of human rights violations to bring a charge or seek compensation from their perpetrators. This precedent ended with Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (2013) which placed a presumption against extraterritoriality, thereby barring the use of ATS for human rights violations committed abroad. This article argues that Congress should add the “Filartiga Amendment'' to the ATS in order to explicitly encode the Filartiga precedent. The amendment would grant federal district courts with original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States, regardless of whether or not the tort was committed in the territory of the United States. This empowers the ATS to be used as a tool for global human rights accountability and is in line with the United States’ stated mission of being a global leader in human rights.