Alien Tort Claim Act
Human rights are nowadays widely considered to be the new trend in the evolution of international law. The focus has now shifted on the means to achieve a proper protection system that would allow citizens and people in general to benefit from their inherited rights as human beings. Nonetheless, despite continuous efforts to improve the system, there are still a great number of questions to be unanswered and discussions over the exact means to ensure protection are vivid among scholars, policy makers, and legal advisers alike. The United States Alien Tort Claim Act of 1789 is considered to be one of the most innovative pieces of legislation in the area of human rights protection. According to the Human Rights Watch "no other country has a law quite like it" (2003), taking into account that it offers a legal opportunity for foreigners to file suit against perpetrators considered to have committed serious breaches of human rights. The novelty of this piece of legislation however, resides in the fact that neither the plaintiff, nor the accused have to reside in the US. Still, the US judicial system can be used in order to trial and set a fair decision in such cases. In order to have a proper view on the importance of this act, a
Moreover, the stated of the lawyers who plea cases under the ATCA is "to have corporations stop violating human rights in their foreign operations" (Baue, 2006). Labor rights represent in fact the freedom of people to associate, to form trade unions, to fight for equal job opportunities, to benefit from the same pay for an equal amount of work (United Nations, 2003). The provisions of the present act fail to give a proper identification of the actual rights it protects through its implementation. In this sense, in the case filed against the Chevron Company for committing abuses in Ecuador, the government did not oppose the abuses. In this sense, the history of the act in itself may point out to the actual necessity for the drafting of the legislation. Thus, the text states that "the district courts shall have 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" (Alien Tort Claim Act, n. However, traditionally, the law of nations as expressed in the Act "is the science of the rights which exist between Nations or States and of the obligations corresponding to these rights" (The Law of Nations, n. Moreover, there have been international regulations set in place in order to establish the right definition of the notion of environmental rights. However, from the perspective of the ones suffering as a result of human rights breach, the protection of their natural and society related rights is by no means viewed as a favor, but rather a prerequisite. There are often discussions on whether labor rights can be considered as being part of the human rights category. The application of the Alien Tort Claim Act has proven this fact. The cases tried under the Alien Tort Claim Act reveal the strict interconnection between political rights economic, social, and cultural ones. Moreover, it cannot be said that an international legally binding legislation would improve the conditions of the human rights protection system because its provisions would either be too weak to actually have positive results, or, on the contrary, they would be too strong for all the states to accept them. In this sense, while the former are more accessible to states to assure, the latter take into consideration the degree in which the state can ensure their protection from an economic point of view.
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