The US Supreme Court this week rejected an appeal by a group of black South Africans seeking to revive human rights litigation aiming to hold IBM liable for allegedly conducting business that helped perpetuate racial apartheid.
The litigation also included US car manufacturer Ford Motor.
The justices did not comment on their order, on Monday, which left in place lower court rulings dismissing lawsuits filed 14 years ago.
The court decided the plaintiffs failed to show that there was a close connection between decisions made or actions taken by IBM and Ford in the US to killings, torture and other human rights abuses that took place in SA from the 1970s to early 1990s.
The federal appeals court in New York said IBM and Ford could not be held liable for the actions of their South African subsidiaries during the apartheid regime.
IBM was accused of providing technology and training to perpetuate racial separation and the "de-nationalisation" of black South Africans. Ford was accused of providing military vehicles for South African security forces and sharing information about anti-apartheid and union activists.
The South African lawyer, who lost his bid to convince US courts to allow him to sue American companies for their role in apartheid, says it was a case worth fighting.
Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza was in charge of the South African side of the case. "It was a novel way of litigating, because the theory of aiding and abetting had only been used in international criminal law," he says.
The plaintiffs, led by Ntsebeza, sued the companies more than a decade ago under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 US law that lets non-US citizens seek damages in American courts for human rights abuses abroad. But the US Supreme Court significantly narrowed the reach of that law in 2013, leading US district judge Shira Scheindlin in 2014 to dismiss the South African plaintiffs' case.
Apartheid ended in 1994 when SA held its first all-race elections, bringing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power.
Share