2026年5月2日 / 《华盛顿邮报》
最高法院即将裁决，法轮功宗教团体成员能否就思科被指在中国政府镇压行动中扮演的角色起诉该公司。
美国东部时间今日凌晨5:00
朱利安·马克与伊娃·杜 报道
2002年8月，威廉·王（William Wang）在北京离开办公室时，便衣警察当街拦住他，将他塞进警车。
王在2011年提起的诉讼中指控，他被带至一处场所，中国安保人员对其进行审讯，用警棍殴打他并用电击棒电击，直至电池耗尽。王称，他被关押近十年，遭受单独监禁、强迫劳动、殴打和其他形式的酷刑。
他的罪名：身为法轮功成员。这一精神运动被中国政府视为政治威胁，最终被武力镇压。
如今定居美国的王多年来一直在等待对美国科技巨头思科系统公司提起的诉讼能够推进。王的诉讼指控思科是监控系统的关键技术供应商，该系统帮助中国共产党迫害他和其他法轮功成员。
“我不反对正常的商业往来，”住在底特律地区、从事软件开发工作的王在一次采访中表示。但他说，思科的所作所为截然不同，因为该公司“知道中共想用其技术做什么”。
思科对此予以否认。法院能否最终裁定哪一方的说法属实，将取决于4月底在美国最高法院辩论的一桩案件的结果。大法官们的裁决预计将于今年晚些时候作出，此举可能会关闭美国法院受理类似王案的大门——即美国公司“协助和教唆”外国政府侵犯国际公认的人权。
本案的核心是一项已有数百年历史的法律：1789年由第一届国会通过的《外国人侵权请求法》。该法律最初旨在通过为非公民（如大使）提供在美国境内就遭受的待遇提起诉讼的机会，避免外交冲突。
该法律被尘封了200年，直到一家联邦上诉法院在一桩涉及巴拉圭公民的酷刑案件中重新启用了它。1980年，纽约一家上诉法院裁定，两名巴拉圭公民可以在美国法院起诉一名巴拉圭警官，因其酷刑杀害了他们17岁的儿子。
人权律师曾希望这项裁决能将《外国人侵权请求法》转变为打击侵犯人权行为的有力工具。然而，在过去二十年里，最高法院缩小了该法律的适用范围，使得提起人权诉讼变得更加困难。
专家表示，思科案为最高法院的保守派多数派提供了进一步限制该法律适用范围的机会。
周二的口头辩论中，高等法院就这些问题展开了激烈讨论。尽管一些大法官似乎对该法律是否赋予法轮功成员起诉权持怀疑态度，但另一些大法官似乎也意识到完全关闭大门可能带来的隐患。
“在我看来，你们面临着严峻的概念挑战，因为我们曾裁定，第一届国会希望法院能够查明普通法下可获得的诉讼权利，”首席大法官约翰·G·罗伯茨小约翰·G·罗伯茨在与代表美国副检察长办公室的律师的对话中说道，该办公室支持思科。“你们显然没有……忠实于第一届国会的意图。”
不过，乔治华盛顿大学专门研究国际法律问题的法学教授威廉·达奇表示，大法官们普遍反对利用《外国人侵权请求法》对公司提起人权诉讼。
“尽管他们几乎肯定不想直接推翻该法律……但他们可以遵循此前案件中的处理模式，”达奇说，并指出最高法院已在四起先前的案件中限制了该法律在人权索赔中的使用。
最高法院在这些案件中担忧的问题包括，该法律不应适用于美国境外的国家，起诉外国公司可能产生负面的外交政策影响。而且，最高法院一直以来都怀疑该法律的制定者本意并非将其用于人权诉讼。
2018年，最高法院驳回了6000名原告的诉讼请求。这些人声称自己或家人是哈马斯恐怖袭击的受害者，并起诉总部位于约旦的阿拉伯银行。他们指控该银行协助资助该组织。以5票对4票的意识形态分歧作出的裁决认为，对于发生在美国司法管辖区之外的事件，外国公司不能根据该法律被起诉。
2021年，最高法院驳回了一群曾被奴役儿童的诉讼。这些儿童指控雀巢美国公司从西非科特迪瓦的可可农场采购大部分可可豆，而这些农场存在童工现象。以8票对1票作出的裁决认为，原告案件中指控的行为在美国境内发生的程度不足以让美国法院受理。
与雀巢案不同的是，王和其他原告——另外11名中国公民和1名美国公民——表示，他们案件中的关键行为发生在美国：思科在硅谷设计该系统并制造其组件。他们还指控思科明知中国政府正利用其系统迫害法轮功成员。
“一直以来，思科都清楚这场镇压如何使公司获益，”原告方在一份案情摘要中告诉法院。“思科的文件将法轮功的‘斗争’描述为‘有利可图的商业机会’。”
思科对此予以否认。2008年，思科时任高级副总裁马克·钱德勒在参议院司法小组委员会关于人权与法律的听证会上作证称：“思科不会定制或开发专门或独特的过滤功能，以帮助不同政权封锁信息访问。”
在给《华盛顿邮报》的电子邮件中，思科一位女发言人援引了钱德勒2011年王和其他原告提起诉讼后发表的一份声明。“我们从未定制过设备来帮助中国政府——或任何政府——审查内容、追踪个人的互联网使用情况或拦截互联网通信，”他写道。
然而在最高法院，这些事实问题基本已被搁置，转而聚焦于一个严格的法律问题：思科辩称，原告根本不应将此案诉诸法庭。该公司表示，原告正在曲解《外国人侵权请求法》，使其适用于原本并非为其设计的纠纷。
根据思科（得到特朗普政府和众多商业组织的支持）的说法，第一届国会主要担忧的是大使权利遭到侵犯和海盗行为——而非美国实体协助和教唆外国政府侵犯人权的可能性。
“协助和教唆责任构成了民事诉因的重大扩张。正因如此，本院已明确表示，通常只有在国会明确指示的情况下才可行使这种责任，”思科的律师坎农·尚穆加姆在4月的听证会上告诉大法官。“承认此类诉因会引发重大的外交政策担忧，就像本案一样，涉及外国政府在外国境内犯下严重不当行为的指控。”
支持商业的倡导组织华盛顿法律基金会在一份法庭之友摘要中补充道，根据《外国人侵权请求法》提起的诉讼“会让美国公司面临代价高昂、负担沉重且旷日持久的诉讼”。
思科及其支持者辩称，如果国会认为公司应该因被指在海外的虐待行为而在美国法院被起诉，国会可以通过一项法律明确允许此类案件。他们表示，法院不应通过重新解释数百年前通过的法律来创设责任。
思科在地区法院胜诉，但在位于加州的第九巡回上诉法院败诉。该公司随后向最高法院提起上诉。
如果第九巡回法院的裁决得以维持，“这将打开 floodgates（闸门），使得仅因合法出口商品和服务而针对美国公司侵犯人权的诉讼泛滥成灾，”思科首席法律官德夫·施塔尔科普夫在第九巡回法院裁决后发表的一份声明中写道。
但如果最高法院支持思科，该裁决可能会实际上终结《外国人侵权请求法》在人权案件中的使用，原告方的加州律师保罗·霍夫曼表示。
“根据请愿人的理论，无论思科的贡献多么实质性和直接，都不能让其为协助和教唆这些侵权行为承担责任，”霍夫曼在4月的听证会上站在大法官面前说道。“根据思科的理论，即使是为纳粹火葬场提供毒气的企业行为者，也不会根据《外国人侵权请求法》承担责任。”
王的案件凸显了人权倡导者希望通过该法律监管的企业行为类型。他指控中国政府利用思科的技术对其进行监控，导致他被捕和入狱。
王在北京清华大学攻读工程学位期间加入了法轮功。他在最近的一次采访中表示，他被该运动对气功的接纳所吸引——气功是一种包含流畅动作、呼吸和冥想的锻炼方式。他也认同其倡导善良与宽容的教义。
当时，法轮功在中国各地广受欢迎，1999年的练习者人数多达1亿。其日益增长的政治组织能力引起了中国官员的担忧。1999年4月，超过1万名法轮功练习者聚集在北京举行抗议后，中国时任领导人江泽民下令进行严厉镇压，其中包括广泛的法外拘留、审讯期间对练习者的酷刑以及在劳教营中的强迫劳动，根据当时的新闻报道和王等酷刑受害者的叙述。
这场镇压很快波及清华大学。王表示，他面临政府官员的压力，要求他放弃信仰。他说，有一次，一名政府官员鼓动王的数十名同学在一场长达两小时的批斗会上谴责他和他的信仰。最终，王离开了大学，被迫放弃了攻读博士学位的计划。
他说，在被监禁期间，政府官员表示他们知道他一直在撰写关于大学里其他法轮功成员遭受迫害的文章——尽管他匿名写作并通过加密文件发送给出版物。直到2011年获释后，王才完全了解监控的全貌，并得知思科据称构建了使其成为可能的系统。
中国大使馆未回应置评请求。
到那时，思科据称参与中国监控的情况已公之于众。2008年北京奥运会后，一份关于中国市场机遇的思科内部幻灯片被泄露给媒体。该幻灯片援引一名中国政府官员的话称，思科作为供应商的“金盾工程”可以“打击‘法轮功’邪教和其他敌对势力”。这些幻灯片引起了国会的审查。
在2008年的参议院听证会上，思科的钱德勒告诉参议员们，他对幻灯片内容“感到震惊”和“失望”。该公司发表声明称，这些幻灯片并不代表思科的观点或原则。
王表示，思科应该承担某种责任。
“我希望所有美国公司都能赚钱，”他说。但“我们需要清楚什么是可接受的，什么是不可接受的。”
威廉·王（摄于今年早些时候）于2002年被监禁近十年。（尼克·安塔亚/为《华盛顿邮报》拍摄）
朱利安·马克 报道
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伊娃·杜 报道
伊娃·杜为驻华盛顿记者，为《华盛顿邮报》报道科技政策。可通过Signal与她安全联系，获取科技与政策动态：evd.10。请在X平台@evadou关注她
Tortured in China, they want to sue Cisco. The Supreme Court may say no.
2026-05-02 / The Washington Post
The Supreme Court will soon decide whether members of the Falun Gong religious group can sue Cisco for its alleged role in a Chinese government crackdown.
Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT
By Julian Mark and Eva Dou
William Wang was leaving his office in Beijing when plainclothes officers accosted him in the street and threw him into a police car.
It was August 2002. Wang was taken to a facility where Chinese security officers interrogated him, beating him and shocking him with electric batons until their batteries ran out of charge, Wang alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2011. Wang remained imprisoned for nearly a decade, subjected to solitary confinement, forced labor, beatings and other forms of torture, he said.
His offense: being a member of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that China’s government viewed as a political threat and eventually crushed through force.
Now living in the United States, Wang has been waiting years to move forward with a lawsuit against an American technology giant — Cisco Systems. Wang’s lawsuit alleges Cisco was a key technical supplier for the surveillance system that allowed the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of him and other Falun Gong members.
“I have no objection to normal business dealings,” Wang, who lives in the Detroit area and works as a software developer, said in an interview. What Cisco did was different, he said, because the company “knew what the CCP wanted to do” with its technology.
The company denies that. Whether a court will ever determine whose account is correct will depend on the outcome of a case argued in late April before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices’ ruling, expected later this year, could close U.S. courts to claims like Wang’s that U.S. companies “aided and abetted” foreign governments in violating internationally recognized human rights.
At issue is a centuries-old law, the Alien Tort Statute, passed by the First Congress in 1789. The law was originally designed to avoid diplomatic conflicts by creating an opportunity for noncitizens, such as ambassadors, to sue over treatment in the United States.
The statute collected dust for 200 years until a federal appeals court revived it in a torture case involving citizens of Paraguay. An appeals court in New York ruled in 1980 that two Paraguayan citizens could sue a Paraguayan police official in U.S. court for torturing and killing their 17-year-old son.
Human rights lawyers hoped the ruling would turn the Alien Tort Statute into a powerful tool to combat rights violations. Over the past two decades, however, the Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of the law, making it harder to bring human rights cases.
The Cisco case presents the court’s conservative majority with the opportunity to even further constrict the law’s reach, experts say.
During arguments Tuesday, the high court grappled with those questions. Although some justices appeared skeptical that the law created a right for the Falun Gong members to sue, others seemed to appreciate the pitfalls of closing the door completely.
“It seems to me that you have a serious conceptual challenge because we’ve held that the First Congress wanted courts to, you know, look and find the rights of action that are available under common law,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in an exchange with a lawyer for the Office of the Solicitor General, which is supporting Cisco. “You’re certainly not being … faithful to the First Congress’s intent.”
Nevertheless, there has been“lot of opposition” among the justices toward using the Alien Tort Statute to bring human rights claims against companies, said William Dodge, a law professor at George Washington University who regularly writes about international legal issues.
“While they almost certainly don’t want to overrule it outright … they can follow the same pattern that they followed in cases to date,” Dodge said, noting that in four prior cases the high court has restricted the law’s use in human rights claims.
Among the court’s concerns in those cases was that the statute should not reach to countries outside the United States and that suing foreign corporations could have negative foreign policy implications. And all along the high court has been skeptical that the law’s framers meant for it to be used in human rights lawsuits.
In 2018, the high court ruled against 6,000 people who alleged that they or family members had been victims of Hamas terrorist attacks and who sued the Jordan-based Arab Bank. They alleged the bank helped fund the group. The 5-4 opinion along ideological lines held that foreign corporations cannot be sued under the statute for events that took place outside of U.S. jurisdiction.
In 2021, the court ruled against a group of formerly enslaved children who alleged that Nestlé USA bought most of its cocoa from farms on the Ivory Coast of West Africa where child slavery has flourished. The 8-1 decision found that not enough of the actions alleged in the plaintiffs’ case took place in the United States to be heard in U.S. courts.
Unlike the Nestlé case, Wang and his fellow plaintiffs — 11 other Chinese nationals and one U.S. citizen — say that key actions in their case took place in the U.S.: Cisco designed the system and built its components in Silicon Valley, they say. And they allege Cisco knew that the Chinese government was using its system to persecute Falun Gong members.
“All along, Cisco was clear about how the crackdown benefitted the company,” the plaintiffs’ told the court in a brief. “Cisco’s files described the douzheng[violent struggle] of Falun Gong ‘as a lucrative business opportunity.’”
Cisco denies that. “Cisco does not customize or develop specialized or unique filtering capabilities in order to enable different regimes to block access to information,” Mark Chandler, then a senior vice president with the company, testified in 2008 to the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on human rights and the law.
In an email to The Washington Post, a Cisco spokeswoman pointed to a statement issued by Chandler after Wang and other plaintiffs filed their lawsuit in 2011. “We have never customized our equipment to help the Chinese government — or any government — censor content, track Internet use by individuals or intercept Internet communications,” he wrote.
At the Supreme Court, however, those factual questions have been largely set aside in favor of a strictly legal one: Cisco argues that the plaintiffs should not be able to take the case to court at all. The plaintiffs are bending the Alien Tort Statute to cover disputes it was never intended for, the company says.
According to Cisco, backed by the Trump administration and a wide variety of business organizations, the First Congress worried primarily about violations of the rights of ambassadors and piracy — not the possibility of U.S. entities aiding and abetting human rights abuses by foreign governments.
“Aiding-and-abetting liability constitutes a significant expansion of a civil cause of action. For that reason, this court has made clear that it is generally not available absent clear congressional direction,” Kannon Shanmugam, a lawyer for Cisco, told the justices during the April hearing. “And recognizing such a cause of action would raise substantial foreign policy concerns, as in this case, which involves serious allegations of wrongdoing in a foreign country by a foreign government.”
Washington Legal Foundation, a pro-business advocacy group, added in an amicus brief that lawsuits under the Alien Tort Statute “would expose American companies to costly, burdensome, and lengthy litigation.”
If Congress believes companies should be open to lawsuits in U.S. courts for alleged abuses overseas, it could pass a law to explicitly allow such cases, the company and its supporters argue. The courts should not create liability by reinterpreting a law passed centuries ago, they say.
Cisco won that argument before a district court but lost in the California-based Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The company appealed to the Supreme Court.
The appeals ruling, if it stands, “would open the floodgates for suits against corporations in the U.S. for human right violations merely based on legal exports of goods and services,” the company’s chief legal officer, Dev Stahlkopf, wrote in a statement after the 9th Circuit ruling.
But if the Supreme Court sides with Cisco, the ruling could effectively end the use of the Alien Tort Statute for human rights cases, said Paul Hoffman, a California attorney for the plaintiffs.
“Under Petitioners’ theory, Cisco cannot be held responsible for aiding and abetting these violations no matter how substantial and direct their contributions were,” Hoffman said, standing before the justices at the April hearing. “Under Cisco’s theory, even the corporate actors who provided the poison gas for Nazi crematoria would not be liable under” the Alien Tort Statute.
Wang’s case illustrates the sorts of corporate behavior that human rights advocates hope the law can be used to police. He alleges that the Chinese government used Cisco’s technology to monitor him, leading to his arrest and imprisonment.
Wang joined Falun Gong while studying engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was drawn to the movement’s embrace of Qigong, a type of exercise that includes flowing movements, breathing and meditation, he said in a recent interview. He also connected with its teachings of kindness and tolerance.
At that time, Falun Gong had become widely popular across China, with as many as 100 million practitioners in 1999. Its growing political organizing power drew concerns from Chinese officials. After more than 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered in Beijing for a protest in April 1999, China’s then-leader, Jiang Zemin, ordered a harsh crackdown, which involved widespread extrajudicial detentions, torture of practitioners during interrogations and forced labor in reeducation camps, according to news reports at time and accounts from torture victims like Wang.
That campaign soon hit Tsinghua. Wang said he faced pressure from government officials to renounce his faith. At one point, a government official encouraged dozens of Wang’s classmates to condemn him and his beliefs during a two-hour shaming session, he said. Eventually, Wang left the university and was forced to give up his quest for a doctorate.
While he was imprisoned, he said, government officials said they knew he had been writing articles about the persecution of other Falun Gong members at the university — even though he wrote his articles anonymously and sent them to the publication via encrypted files. Only after Wang was released from prison in 2011 did he learn the full scope of the surveillance and that Cisco had allegedly built the system that made it possible.
China’s embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
By then, Cisco’s alleged involvement in Chinese surveillance had become public. After the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, an internal Cisco slide deck on market opportunities in China was leaked to the media. The slide deck cited a Chinese government official saying the Golden Shield project, for which Cisco was a vendor, could “combat ‘Falun Gong’ evil religion and other hostiles.” The slides drew scrutiny from Congress.
In the 2008 Senate hearing, Cisco’s Chandler told senators that he was “appalled” and “disappointed” at the slide deck. The company issued a statement saying the slides did not represent Cisco’s views or principles.
Wang said Cisco should face some kind of accountability.
“I hope all American companies can make money,” he said. But “we need to understand what things are acceptable and what things are not.”
William Wang, shown earlier this year, was imprisoned in 2002 for nearly a decade. (Nic Antaya/For The Washington Post)
By Julian Mark
Julian Mark covers the Supreme Court for The Washington Post. follow on X@juleswapo
By Eva Dou
Eva Dou is a Washington-based reporter covering technology policy for the Washington Post. Connect securely on Signal with her about tech and policy developments at evd.10. follow on X evadou
