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Apartheid lawsuits 'too broad'
07/11/2003 07:18 - (SA)
New York - A federal judge appeared likely on Thursday to dismiss a string of lawsuits seeking to make dozens of companies pay billions of dollars in damages for abuses suffered under South Africa's apartheid government.
US District Judge John Sprizzo was highly sceptical of arguments by the plaintiffs, who claim complicity by international corporations made it easier for murder, torture and other abuses to occur.
"How does it follow that anyone who does business with apartheid is also in violation of international law?" he asked. "This case requires an awful lot of leaps."
Sprizzo said he would issue a written opinion in the matter later. But he suggested during an hours-long hearing in Manhattan federal court that he might dismiss the suits.
He indicated the claims brought by thousands of black South Africans were too broad, but left open the possibility that smaller suits could be filed alleging specific criminal acts rather than a broad pattern.
Defendants include oil titans ExxonMobil and Shell Oil, banks Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and UBS, and transportation giants Ford Motor and DaimlerChrysler.
The lawsuits attempt to follow a precedent established in litigation on behalf of Holocaust victims, who gained more than a billion dollars in settlements with corporations.
'Companies helped prop up white government'
The lawsuits claim the companies helped prop up South Africa's white government with loans and other deals worth billions of dollars, even after the United Nations asked all member states to break off diplomatic and business relations with the country in 1962.
Deliberate indifference
One lawsuit claimed the corporations "acted with deliberate indifference to the well-being of the African population" while doing business in South Africa before the fall of apartheid in 1994.
But the judge said he saw no consensus among nations that doing business with a country violating international law is a practice that itself violates international law.
"We do business with China. We do business with Russia," he said. "We do business with all kinds of countries around the world that you could say arguably violate human rights in ways that are much more egregious than apartheid."
South Africa's segregationist regime began in 1948 and ended 46 years later with the election of Nelson Mandela as president in the nation's first all-race elections.
Sprizzo, in peppering plaintiffs' lawyer Michael Osborne with questions, suggested holding the companies liable would be like a foreign court penalising any American company that did business during the age of US slavery.
"I think we would take a dim view of a foreign court doing that," he said.
The judge said the South African government has written to him asking that US courts stay out of the matter, and he said he was inclined to give the request serious consideration.
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