In my master thesis I discuss the question of civil international liability of multinational corporations for human rights violations. More specifically it deals with the case of some Nigerian citizens filing a lawsuit in 2002 in the United States against a big oil company such as Shell Dutch Petroleum operating in Nigeria too for aiding and abetting the Nigerian military in massive killings and torture of the citizens of the Ogoni River for several years. The legal basis for the complaint relies upon the american Alien Tort Claim Act (ATCA), which seems to have been dormant in the last decades and is now being called upon for answering the question whether under this statute not only individuals but even legal persons such as multinational corporations may be held liable for severe human rights violations.

On the 17th April 2013 the decision of the Supreme Court, which from the perspective of human rights protection was a disappointing one, didn't answer the laid question. Instead in its reasoning it held that the Alien Tort Claims Act shouldn't be extended to crimes committed outside the US based on the principle of presumption against extraterritoriality, thus narrowing the scope of the statute. Another prerequisite mentioned in the decision to overcome the overstated principle was the "sufficient force" element, which might be taken into consideration when a plaintiff shows evidence of having ties to the United States.

Considering that this enforcement mechanism of human rights such as ATCA as one of a kind, because the European counterparts haven't presented any such legal recourse yet, one tends to believe that the fate of the people asking for legal remedies for human rights violations lays in the hands of the Supreme Court judges, whereby the term justice which obviously is deducted from the notion of the state of law doesn't seem to find an echo. So what might be the solutions for this gap...