High court won't allow DaimlerChrysler suit in Calif.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court decided Tuesday not to let a suit move forward in California that accuses a foreign company of committing atrocities on foreign soil. The decision could make it harder for foreign victims of foreign crime to seek justice in U.S. courts.

The high court Tuesday used a unanimous judgment to refuse to allow survivors and victims of Argentina's "dirty war" to sue in California the former DaimlerChrysler Corp. of Stuttgart, Germany, for alleged abuses in Argentina.

Victims who say they were kidnapped and tortured by the Argentine government in the late 1970s and relatives of those who disappeared sued in state court, alleging Mercedes-Benz was complicit in the killing, torture, or kidnapping by the military of unionized autoworkers.

The suit points to "material assistance" from the Mercedes-Benz plant in Gonzalez-Catan, near Buenos Aires.

The suit said Daimler could be sued in California since its subsidiary, Mercedes-Benz USA, sold cars in that state. A federal judge threw that suit out, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said it could move forward.

If the court had accepted the victims' reasoning, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, "if a Mercedes-Benz vehicle overturned in Saudi Arabia injuring a driver and passengers from Norway, the injured persons could maintain a design defect suit in California."

The decision in DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman does not mean that foreign companies can never be sued for foreign crimes in the United States.

Ginsburg said that there could be an "exceptional case [where] a corporation's operations in a forum other than its formal place of incorporation or principal place of business may be so substantial and of such a nature as to render the corporation at home in that state."