In a closely watched matter, the US Solicitor General has filed a brief suggesting to the US Supreme Court that a lawsuit filed against Pfizer by several Nigerians over the 1996 Trovan scandal should proceed. Essentially, this means the Solicitor General disagrees with Pfizer’s interpretation of a law that has been relied upon to claim US companies committed eggregious behavior overseas, and that the Supreme Court should not bother to hear the case (see the brief).

The law involved is known as the Alien Tort Statute and it was cited by several Nigerian families who accuse Pfizer of violating international humans rights law - various provisions from the Nuremberg Code; the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; guidelines from the Council for International Organizations of Medical Services; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and a United Nations General Assembly Resolution.

The 1996 Trovan study was conducted on about 200 children and took place during a meningitis epidemic that killed 12,000 children, but Pfizer was accused of failing to obtain proper regulatory approval and for misleading parents. The study allegedly left 11 children dead and the others were deformed. Pfizer denied the charges and settled the bulk of litigation this summer by agreeing to pay $75 million to settle civil and criminal charges brought by the Kano State government in Nigeria. There is currently a dispute over DNA testing (see this).

The Solicitor General didn’t comment specifically on the merits of the case. And of course, the Supreme Court may still decide to grant Pfizer’s request. “The court is very interested in this particular, because they took the trouble to request that the Solicitor General file a brief,” Richard Samp, chief counsel of the Washington Legal Foundation, tells us. “That by itself means there is a reasonably good chance the court will grant review.” The WLF, by the way, filed a friend of the court brief in support of Pfizer’s position.

The case is being closely watched, in part, because it raises some points near and dear to multi-national corporations - whether such a company can be sued under the Alien Tort Statute and whether violations of this statute encompass activities conducted overseas. “This is an abuse of the American court system and not what Congress ever intended,” says Samp, “and people are trying to make political points about what they see as important conduct of overseas corporations.”