Letters

LET'S HEAR IT FOR ATCA!

Washington, DC

Daphne Eviatar's otherwise excellent article on the lawsuits against Unocal, which seek to hold the company liable for human rights abuses committed as part of its operations in Burma ["Profits at Gunpoint," June 30], implies that the statute has only recently been pulled from obscurity to sue multinational corporations. In reality, the law--the Alien Tort Claims Act--has been used for more than twenty years to sue individuals responsible for egregious human rights abuses. In a landmark 1980 human rights case, Filartiga v. Pena-Irala, litigated by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the family of a young man tortured to death in Paraguay sued the torturer, then living in New York City, and won.

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