{"id":23304,"date":"2014-09-26T16:06:55","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T21:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=23304"},"modified":"2014-09-29T13:25:35","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T18:25:35","slug":"thoughts-on-mwani-v-al-qaeda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2014\/09\/thoughts-on-mwani-v-al-qaeda\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Mwani v. Al Qaeda"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal magistrate judge issued a noteworthy decision yesterday in Mwani v. Al Qaeda<\/em>\u2014a case filed several years ago by victims of the 1998 truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Six Kenyan nationals\u00a0alleged jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and asserted claims for wrongful death, assault, and battery. The court found Al Qaeda liable on two of the claims and awarded compensatory and punitive damages.<\/p>\n

Two aspects of the decision seem significant. First, the court reaffirmed a prior holding that jurisdiction was appropriate even under the Supreme Court\u2019s decision in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum<\/em>, which established that ATS\u00a0jurisdiction is available only for claims that \u201ctouch and concern the territory of the United States\u201d with \u201csufficient force\u201d to displace the presumption against the extraterritorial application of U.S. law. The magistrate judge concluded that Mwani<\/em> satisfied Kiobel<\/em> because Al Qaeda carried out part of the planning within the United States and directed the attack against the U.S. Embassy and its employees. It\u2019s fairly common for an ATS case not to survive Kiobel <\/em>these days, but the conclusion here seems reasonable.<\/p>\n

Second, the court found Al Qaeda liable to the six victims based on the common law of assault and battery. This part of the decision is more problematic. The ATS provides for federal jurisdiction over \u201cany civil action by an alien for a tort,\u201d but only when that tort is \u201ccommitted in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.\u201d The question, then, is not simply whether the defendant\u2019s conduct is tortious, but whether it\u2019s tortious as a matter of international law<\/em>. In this analysis, domestic common law is relevant only as the vehicle by which a violation of international law becomes actionable. Pure common law tort claims are simply disallowed. Indeed, not even all claims resting on international law are actionable. As the Supreme Court explained in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain<\/em>, the ATS provides jurisdiction only for claims that \u201crest on a norm of international character accepted by the civilized world and defined with a specificity comparable to the features of the 18th century\u201d international prohibitions on the violation of safe conducts, infringement of the rights of ambassadors, and piracy. For the Mwani <\/em>plaintiffs to prevail, they have to show not only that international law prohibits assault and battery, but that those prohibitions are widely accepted and clearly defined. They didn\u2019t do this, and I\u2019m skeptical that they could.<\/p>\n

The court appears to have considered ATS jurisdiction appropriate because another judge previously concluded that the \u201cattack on the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya alleged in Plaintiffs\u2019 Complaint impinged the diplomatic mission of the United States and directly infringed on the rights of ambassadors.\u201d But as I understand it, that\u2019s not how it works. The issue is not whether any aspect of the defendant\u2019s conduct amounts to a tort in violation of international law, but whether the defendant’s\u00a0conduct vis-\u00e0-vis the plaintiffs<\/em> amounts to such a tort. None of the plaintiffs was a U.S. ambassador or employee of the U.S. Embassy, and the basis for their claims is not injury to the ambassador but rather themselves, so the international law on the protection of ambassadors has no bearing on the merits of their claims. Exercising ATS jurisdiction in these circumstances is analogous to using federal question jurisdiction to adjudicate a standard state-law tort claim on the reasoning that a third party could\u2019ve brought a federal claim arising out of the same incident. That doesn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal magistrate judge issued a noteworthy decision yesterday in Mwani v. Al Qaeda\u2014a case filed several years ago by victims of the 1998 truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Six Kenyan nationals\u00a0alleged jurisdiction under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and asserted claims for wrongful death, assault, and battery. The court found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,20,122],"tags":[160,161],"class_list":["post-23304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-federal-law-legal-system","category-international-law","category-public","tag-alien-tort-statute","tag-mwani-v-al-qaeda","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23304\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}