Free Belching Out the Devil by Mark Thomas

deliver justice then one of the only avenues left is ATCA.
    Increasingly, human rights’ advocates are using the Act to bring multinationals to the courts. In 1997 suit was filed against the oil company UNOCAL for alleged human rights abuses in the construction of its oil pipeline in Burma. In 2004 the company went for an out-of-court settlement, paying an undisclosed sum in damages. 10
    Another case relates to Chinese dissident Wang Xiaoning, who used a Yahoo! email account to post pro-democracy articles anonymously. Yahoo! complied with a request by the Chinese authorities for information on the account which lead to the arrest detention and torture of Wang, the lawsuit filed against the company claimed. Yahoo! also settled for an undisclosed sum out of court. 11 Wang Xiaoning remains in custody serving a ten-year sentence.
    Currently Firestone, Exxon, Shell and Wal-Mart have suits filed against them under the Alien Tort Claims Act. 12
    Pro-corporate lobby groups have sought to limit the scope of the law. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill to do just that. She said her bill was ‘designed to balance the interests of US companies and human rights groups.’ She also received $10,000 that same year for her re-election fund from Chevron 13 - another company with a pending case against them. She shortly after had a change of heart, and withdrew her bill, ‘in light of concerns raised by human rights activists’. 14
    Given that the law can be applied to acts of kidnap, torture
and murder, attempts to limit it or reduce the law’s effectiveness in order to balance US interests seems to imply that US multinationals can’t compete in the global marketplace without the odd incident of complicity in murder, kidnap and torture.
    SINALTRAINAL
    July 2001 , the United Steelworkers of America union and the International Labor Rights Fund filed an Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) suit on behalf of Sinaltrainal in the US Federal Court in Miami. The suit, claiming $500 million compensation for the plantiffs, alleges that the bottlers Panamerican Beverages (Panamco) and Bebidas y Alimento ‘contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilised extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders,’ and that The Coca-Cola Company as the parent company bore indirect responsibility. The Colombian bottlers deny the charges.
    The Coca-Cola Company argued the Colombian bottlers were separate companies and The Coca-Cola Company had no case to answer, stating ‘We deny any wrongdoing regarding human rights or any other unlawful activities in Colombia or anywhere else in the world’ adding that, ‘The Coca-Cola company do not own or operate any bottling plants in Colombia’. 15
    The union’s legal team argued The Coca-Cola Company exerted control over its bottlers by way of a legal agreement, called unimaginatively - ‘the bottlers’ agreement’. The argument went thus: The Coca-Cola Company licences the production of their drinks, they provide the syrup with which to make them and dictate the types of bottles, cans, industrial processes, adverts and promotions that the bottlers are to use. Thus they exert a degree of legal and economic control.
Furthermore, The Coca-Cola Company not only possessed ‘a controlling 24 per cent interest’ in Panamco’s stock, but had two seats on Panamco’s Board. 16 And whilst Bebidas y Alimentos, was owned by US citizen Richard Kirby, the union’s lawyer claimed that The Coca-Cola Company had such an influence on the company that it refused to agree to their request to sell the business in 1997. 17
    The case is being brought by the International Labor Rights Fund, supported by the United Steelworkers of America on a no-win no-fee basis (though this does not apply to any money settled on for the victims of violence).
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    March 2003 In an landmark