By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

In the decades since oil riches created a class of extraordinary wealth in the Middle East, thousands of small boys from South Asia and Africa have been abducted, enslaved and forced to work in deplorable conditions as camel riders, tenders and trainers all to entertain the rich.

But if one expected the lengthy brief to have been filed by an international human-rights organization, they’d be surprised to learn that the jockeys are being represented by Mount Pleasant-based Motley Rice law firm.

And even a cursory scan of the rest of the docket related to the suit, which was initially filed in September last year, reveals the case is raising big questions regarding international law and may portend a significant new trend in class action litigation.

Arguments are currently scheduled for July on whether the case is allowed to proceed.

The case was brought under a 1789 law, the Alien Tort Statute, which allows federal courts to hear claims by foreign citizens who allege they were injured “in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

“It’s a law, believe it or not, that was originally drafted after several ambassadors were assaulted on the streets of Philadelphia in the 1780s,” said attorney Richard A. Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation, a pro-business organization. “The thought was that the rights of these ambassadors ought to be protected.”

Two hundred years later, human rights organizations stumbled upon the largely forgotten law and began using it as a vehicle to right “human-rights wrongs,” Samp said.

“They had some success, achieving some victories and some settlements on behalf of their clients, and that lead to others starting to use the law in other ways,” he said.

In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court even weighed in, limiting claims to instances of piracy, torture and slavery.

But that hasn’t stopped class action contingency firms from filing lawsuits that continue to worry the business community and their legal advocates. One such suit, currently before the U.S. District Court in New York, seeks to hold accountable any U.S. corporation that had ties to the South African government during the apartheid period.

Another current suit targets American oil companies for atrocities that may have been committed by government troops in Angola as they endeavored to protect the country’s oil fields.

Washington Legal Foundation has filed a “friend of the court” brief in the Motley Rice case, asking the court to throw the suit out.

“Our interest in the case has nothing to do with a great interest in the subject matter. As a tort reform group, we don’t like what we see as an excessive number of lawsuits being filed under this act,” Samp said.

The brief argues that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over the case because the actions being litigated involved both plaintiffs and defendants who were not U.S. citizens engaged in activities that occurred outside the United States.

“There are probably 100 cases like the Motley Rice suit pending in federal courts, which admittedly is not a huge number, but every one is a huge case and, in our view, very problematic,” Samp said.

While attorneys handling the case for Motley Rice did not respond to telephone calls or e-mails seeking comment on the case, few dispute the assertions laid out in their legal brief. In fact, the U.S. State Department reported as recently as two years ago that thousands of children from Bangladesh, Pakistan and elsewhere had been sold into slavery as camel jockeys.

The Motley Rice brief contends that U.S. courts have jurisdiction over the defendants—Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, and Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid al Maktoum, the country’s finance minister—because they own property, including several thoroughbred race horses, in the United States.

However, officials in the United Arab Emirates, where the activity spelled out in the lawsuit occurred, and even the State Department contend that much progress has been made toward eliminating the practice.

The UAE has established a Web site, www.dubaicameljockeys.org, to explain how the country has repatriated nearly 1,000 victims and sheltered or repatriated many of them in cooperation with the United Nation’s Children’s Fund.

The Web site also includes extensive information on the robot jockeys that have been created to replace the former child jockeys.

Based in part on these recent activities, the defendants in the Motley Rice case deny any wrongdoing.

“The allegations against the leaders of the UAE are baseless,” Habib Al Mulla, a spokesman for the Dubai government said. “The leaders of the UAE, working with UNICEF and all four of the affected home countries, have put in place a comprehensive program that UNICEF calls a model for the region.

“Diplomacy has worked and there’s no need for courts to intervene. This misguided lawsuit isn’t about solving a problem. We’re already helping the boys who used to work in camel racing. The question is whether American class action lawsuits should be exported to places where they clearly don’t belong.”

Not surprisingly, attorney Joseph G. Finnerty III, a counsel for defendants, sounded a similar theme.

“If cases like this are allowed to proceed, U.S. courts will become responsible for grievances that have nothing whatsoever to do with the United States,” Finnerty said. “The law is clear that on these facts a United States court should abstain and allow UNICEF, the UAE and each of the affected countries to do their important and groundbreaking work.

“Imagine how we would feel if courts in another part of the world decided they had jurisdiction over alleged actions by Americans, in America, against other Americans. We would be affronted and rightly so.”

The driving issue behind the case isn’t human rights, but the changing fortunes of the plaintiffs bar in the United States, Finnerty said.

“The big money cases in asbestos and tobacco are winding down,” he said. “It appears that some firms now see international contingency fee class actions as a replacement for this declining business.”

But Samp, for one, said he believes the impact of such cases extends beyond the future fortunes, or lack thereof, of the plaintiffs bar in the United States.

These cases have significant ramifications in the political and global business realm as well.

“If you allow these suits to go forward, and I’m not just singling out Motley Rice here, it would be a little hard for us to object if Germany or some other country wanted to try Donald Rumsfeld as a war criminal in connection with the war in Iraq,” Samp said. “The other, and perhaps more tangible, thing these suits may do is chill global economic activity and discourage development in the Third World.

“It can’t be good for underdeveloped countries if they can’t attract corporations who fear they’ll be tied up in expensive lawsuits related to past rights violations. There’s no question I believe that these suits serve to diminish opportunity for people who want to be involved in the global economy.”

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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