What's new

Welcome

If you already have an account, please login, but if you don't have one yet, you are more than welcome to freely join the community of lawyers around the world..

Register Log in
  • We don't have any responsibilities about the news being sent in this site. Legal News are automatically being collected from sources and submitted in this forum by feed readers. Source of each news is set in the news and a link to its source is always added.
    (Any News older than 21 days from its post time will be deleted automatically!)

Jurist US Appeals Court renews lawsuit against companies allegedly funding Iraq terrorism

Status
Not open for further replies.
  • Thread starter
  • Staff
  • #1

Dadparvar

Staff member
Nov 11, 2016
10,601
0
6
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday renewed a lawsuit against twenty-one medical equipment and pharmaceutical companies over allegations that their contracts with Iraq’s health ministry aided in funding terrorism that ultimately led to the death of American soldiers during the Iraq War.

AstraZeneca, GE Healthcare USA Holding, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Hoffmann-La Roche, and other companies are accused by plaintiffs, family members of victims of the attack in Iraq by the Mahdi group, of providing illegal support to terrorist acts in two ways. First, plaintiffs claim that defendants used local agents to deliver cash kickbacks to the terrorists who gave them business. Second, plaintiffs argue that defendants delivered extra, off-the-books batches of valuable medical goods to Jaysh al-Mahdi to sell on the black market to fund their operation and pay terrorist fighters. Jaysh al-Mahdi is a militia group funded by Hezbollah, who had power over Iraq’s health ministry during the time of the war in Iraq.

On July 17, 2020, a District of Columbia District Court granted defendant’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim for either direct or secondary liability. Along with multiple other findings, the District Court found proximate causation was defeated by defendant’s insistence that they provided “life-saving medical goods” to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, not Jaysh al-Mahdi. The Appeals Court on Tuesday disagreed, stating, “aid directed to beneficial or legitimate-seeming operations conducted by a terrorist organization does not alone attenuate the role of the aid in using terrorist acts.”

In total, the Appeals Court reversed on three issues and remanded the balance of the issues to be addressed by the district court consistent with the court’s opinion. First, the court concluded that plaintiffs plead facts that suffice to support their aiding-and-abetting claim at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Second, with respect to the direct liability claim, the court concluded that plaintiffs have adequately pleaded that defendants’ payments to Jaysh al Mahdi proximately caused plaintiffs’ injuries. Third, the court concluded that the district court’s personal jurisdiction analysis was unduly restrictive.

The post US Appeals Court renews lawsuit against companies allegedly funding Iraq terrorism appeared first on JURIST - News.

Continue reading...

Note: We don't have any responsibilities about this news. Its been posted here by Feed Reader and we had no controls and checking on it. And because News posted here will be deleted automatically after 21 days, threads are closed so that no one spend time to post and discuss here. You can always check the source and discuss in their site.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top