The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement could not sue a U.S. company that they claimed helped facilitate the Chinese government’s efforts to target and torture them.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett signaled an unwillingness to expand the scope of a 237-year-old law that had been designed to allow foreigners to bring lawsuits in U.S. courts for violations of international law.

The ruling in favor of Cisco Systems, a technology company based in San Jose, Calif., could help insulate other companies from legal risks in dealings with foreign governments with histories of engaging in human rights abuses.

The company has denied that its technology was customized to enable the Chinese government to facilitate repression, calling the allegation “inaccurate and entirely without foundation.”

In a mixed ruling that reversed a lower appeals court that had sided with the Falun Gong members, all of the court’s conservatives joined Justice Barrett in the majority, and two of the court’s liberals joined in part. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined in part by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Supreme Court case involved a federal law known as the Alien Tort Statute, which was enacted in 1789 by the country’s first Congress. The law initially focused on international disputes like piracy and threats to ambassadors, allowing for such foreign matters to be examined in American courts.

For decades, the law has also been used as a tool to bring claims of international human rights abuses into U.S. courts. But in recent years, the Supreme Court has taken an increasingly narrow approach to the statute, limiting the types of claims allowed.

Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that draws on elements of Buddhism, became a focus of the Chinese government in April 1999 after members protested peacefully outside of a Beijing compound for the country’s Communist Party leaders.

After the rally, China’s government banned Falun Gong and announced an arrest warrant for the movement’s leader, Li Hongzhi. The government also labeled the group as a cult, an accusation that the organization has denied, and targeted members, subjecting them to physical and mental torture, forced labor and detention, according to a Human Rights Watch report. The Chinese government has previously denied torturing Falun Gong members.

In 2011, practitioners of Falun Gong sued Cisco Systems in the United States under the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1991 law that allows individuals to sue foreign officials for torture.

Members of the group asserted that the company helped the Chinese government to develop the “Golden Shield,” the country’s internet censorship program. This technology, the members said, enabled the government to put in place a brutal system to crack down on Falun Gong.

The lawsuit stalled after a federal trial-level judge dismissed the claims, but it gained momentum again in 2023, when a divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit revived several of the Falun Gong members’ claims.

The dispute, Cisco Systems v. Doe I, is one of several recent cases in which the justices have faced debates over the scope of the federal laws that allow claims of international human rights abuses to be heard in U.S. courts. The Trump administration had joined the case in support of Cisco.

During the oral argument, several of the questions focused on a 2004 case before the court, Sosa v. Alvarez Machain, which involved the abduction of a man suspected in the 1985 kidnapping and murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency special agent in Mexico.

In that case, the court did not allow Humberto Álvarez-Machain, a physician and Mexican national who had been kidnapped and brought to the United States to sue the U.S. government. The court concluded that the Alien Tort Statute had most likely been originally understood to permit challenges under only three specific violations of international norms: the violation of rules allowing safe-conduct in other countries, the infringement of the rights of ambassadors and piracy.

Even though the court has not recognized other causes of action under the law, lower courts have found many, creating disagreements among the federal courts, a common reason for the Supreme Court to review cases.

At the argument in late April, several of the conservative justices said they thought that the other branches of government were better equipped to deal with accusations of human rights violations in other countries.