Supreme court upholds apartheid-era lawsuit

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court - apparently handcuffed by possible conflicts of interest - has allowed a multibillion-dollar federal lawsuit from South African blacks and others to proceed. The suit claims U.S. and foreign companies should be held liable for helping the former white-led apartheid government.

Four members of the high court were forced to remove themselves from consideration of the cases. Although no reason was given for their recusal, financial disclosure reports show Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito, own stock in several of the companies being sued. Justice Anthony Kennedy's son Gregory is a top manager in investment bank Credit Suisse.

The justices in a brief order Monday said that "because the court lacks a quorum," they let stand a lower court ruling allowing the class-action lawsuit to go forward.

Under federal rules, at least six justices must hear a case that is accepted for review. With four of the nine recused, the high court had no choice but to uphold the lower court ruling.

The lawsuits want nearly three dozen U.S. and foreign companies to pay as much as $400 billion to South African blacks and others who say they suffered under that country's official policy of oppressive separation of the races between 1948 and 1994.

A federal court last October agreed to hear some 10 related lawsuits. The Bush administration argued the appeals court was wrong to accept the "unprecedented and sprawling" claims.

The governments of Britain, Germany, Switzerland, and post-apartheid South Africa filed supporting memos.

The private suits were filed under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), which allows foreigners access to American courts when they allege U.S. laws or treaties were violated. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act - passed in 1986 over President Reagan's veto - banned U.S. companies from establishing new trade and business with South Africa. Other nations had similar laws.

Among the key plaintiffs is Lungisile Ntsebeza, a sociology professor at the University of Cape Town. He was arrested by the white-controlled South African government in 1976, and spent nearly six years in prison for his anti-apartheid activism. He claims he was beaten and tortured while in custody, and later was banished for six years to a remote part of the country.

In his lawsuit, Ntsebeza's lawyers say companies that continued to do business in his homeland provided "resources, such as technology, money and oil, to the South African government," which in turn used them "to further its polices of oppression and persecution of the African majority."

The lawsuits are part of a years-long global effort to hold a range of parties accountable for decades of human rights violations in South Africa.

That nation's current black-majority government opposes the lawsuit, saying it would hurt its ongoing efforts to foster reconciliation and improve the economic security of all its citizens.

The Bush administration, in its brief, said, "Litigation such as this would also interfere with the ability of the U.S. government to employ the full range of foreign policy options when interacting with regimes the United States would like to influence. ... Such policies would be greatly undermined if the corporations that invest or operate in a foreign country are subjected to lawsuits under the ATS."

The Justice Department argued the ATS allows lawsuits only against the South African government, not companies that allegedly "aided and abetted" repressive polices.

The case is American Isuzu Motors Inc. v. Ntsebeza (07-919).