Facts
- Plaintiffs, individuals injured in attacks (and representatives of those killed), sued alleging responsibility for the murder of an Israeli civilian during violence in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
- Defendants were the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
- Plaintiffs filed under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), 28 U.S.C. § 1350, alleging defendants sponsored and carried out attacks against Jewish civilians.
- The complaint initially characterized the alleged conduct as “terrorism.”
- After defendants moved to dismiss for failure to plead a law-of-nations violation, plaintiffs amended to describe the conduct as “murder of a civilian in the course of armed conflict,” framed as a war crime and violation of the law of nations.
Issues
- Whether the amended allegations stated a sufficiently definite, universally accepted “violation of the law of nations” to support subject-matter jurisdiction under the ATS.
- Whether labeling the conduct as “terrorism,” or recharacterizing it as civilian murder in an armed conflict (a war-crimes theory), satisfied the ATS requirement recognized in post-Sosa doctrine.
- Whether dismissal was required based on jurisdictional defects raised in defendants’ motion to dismiss (including subject-matter jurisdiction and related threshold challenges).
Decision
- The court granted defendants’ motion to dismiss.
- The court dismissed the action for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction under the ATS.
- The court held plaintiffs did not sufficiently establish a cognizable violation of the law of nations to invoke ATS jurisdiction.
Legal Principles
- The ATS is jurisdictional and requires a well-defined, universally accepted, and obligatory international-law norm as the predicate for federal subject-matter jurisdiction.
- Allegations framed in broad terms such as “terrorism,” without tying the claim to a recognized and specifically defined customary international-law norm, may be insufficient to satisfy the ATS law-of-nations requirement.
- Recharacterizing alleged violence as a war crime does not confer ATS jurisdiction unless the pleadings adequately connect the defendants’ conduct to a clearly recognized international-law prohibition with sufficient definitional specificity.
Conclusion
The court dismissed the ATS claims against the PA and PLO because plaintiffs failed to plead a sufficiently established law-of-nations violation to support subject-matter jurisdiction, illustrating the constrained scope of ATS causes of action under post-Sosa standards.