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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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