On 21 April 2025, PJI and Professor William Aceves intervened on behalf of Congressman Chris Smith (NJ-47th District) in a US Supreme Court case led by the Human Rights Law Foundation (HRLF) and Schonbrun Seplow Harris Hoffman & Zeldes LLP.
The case alleges that the California-based tech company, Cisco Systems, Inc. (Cisco) customized its technology to help China persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. Specifically, the complaint alleges that Cisco provided surveillance technology knowing that it would be used to facilitate crimes against humanity, including torture, and other violence against Falun Gong members, all the while intending to benefit from the CCP’s repression. Cisco is seeking review of a Ninth Circuit decision that would allow the case to move forward to trial.
HRLF initially filed Doe v. Cisco Systems, Inc. in May 2011, alleging that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) arbitrarily detained hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners and subjected them to forced labor camps. The complaint alleges that Falun Gong believers who were arbitrarily detained in these camps were forced to undergo “ideological conversion,” steel rod beatings, and electric baton shocks, and that these practices amounted to torture and resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings. It further alleges that in collaboration with CCP officials, Cisco designed, implemented, and helped to maintain a multi-tiered surveillance system called The Golden Shield, a system intended to allow the CCP:
“. . . to eavesdrop, tap and intercept the communications of Falun Gong believers; surveil, detect, monitor and track their online communication; apprehend, interrogate, ideologically convert and in other ways torture, arbitrarily arrest and detain them because of their religious beliefs, with the specific purpose of suppressing Falun Gong believers[.]”
– Doe v. Cisco Systems, Inc., Second Amended Complaint, para. 1.
PJI’s brief challenges Cisco’s assertion that the case itself runs counter to U.S. policy and that Congress had approved their surveillance technology partnership with China’s governing party. Instead, using evidence of Congress’s repeated efforts to decry the human rights situation in China, to highlight threats faced by political dissidents and religious minorities in the country, and to rebuke U.S. corporate complicity in the transfer of surveillance technology to Beijing, the brief demonstrates that victims’ claims are fully consistent with long-standing, bipartisan U.S. foreign policy regarding violations of Falun Gong practitioners’ human rights.
The case went to conference on 22 May 2025, after which the Court requested briefing from the U.S. Solicitor General, the federal government’s attorney in Supreme Court cases.
On 29 October 2025, Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and Representative John Moolenaar (R-MI), Chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, submitted a letter calling on the Solicitor General to urge the Court to deny Cisco’s petition in the Cisco case, which, they say, should be reviewed on its merits rather than delayed any further.
PJI continues to monitor the case in solidarity with the victims who await the Court’s ruling.
Read PJI’s brief:
Read the Complaint and find out more about the case on the Human Rights Law Foundation’s website.