{"id":721675,"date":"2026-06-23T18:37:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T18:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/721675\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T18:37:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T18:37:15","slug":"court-rules-for-exxon-mobil-in-cuban-confiscation-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/721675\/","title":{"rendered":"Court rules for Exxon Mobil in Cuban confiscation case"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in Exxon Mobil v. Corporaci\u00f3n Cimex<\/a> that a lawsuit by Exxon Mobil against Cuban state-owned companies for the confiscation of assets owned by subsidiaries of the oil giant\u2019s predecessor can go forward.<\/p>\n

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained<\/a> that the Helms-Burton Act, a federal law passed in 1996, cancels the immunity that the Cuban government and its companies would normally have, so that plaintiffs seeking to rely on that statute to sue them are not required to satisfy an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act<\/a>, a federal law that generally prohibits lawsuits in U.S. courts against foreign governments and their \u201cagencies and instrumentalities.\u201d \u201cStacking an FSIA requirement on top of the Helms-Burton Act would thwart Congress\u2019s design and directly contravene the President\u2019s foreign policy judgments,\u201d Kavanaugh wrote.<\/p>\n

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. She argued that \u201c[n]othing in the text or \u2018architecture\u2019 of the Helms-Burton Act suggests that Congress abrogated the sovereign immunity of these defendants\u2014much less that it did so with the requisite unmistakable clarity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The law at the center of the case was the\u00a0Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act<\/a>, also known as the LIBERTAD Act or the Helms-Burton Act. It allows U.S. nationals to bring lawsuits in federal court against anyone who \u201ctraffics in property which was confiscated by the Cuban Government on or after January 1, 1959.\u201d It also gives the president the power to suspend the right to bring a lawsuit when he believes that doing so is \u201cnecessary to the national interests of the United States and will expedite a transition to democracy in Cuba.\u201d From 1996 until 2019, when President Donald Trump declined to renew the suspension, U.S. presidents repeatedly suspended the right to bring a lawsuit.<\/p>\n

Exxon filed the case in federal court in Washington, D.C. It contended that three Cuban-owned companies violated the Helms-Burton Act by trafficking in confiscated property that Exxon owned \u2013 specifically, by (among other things), extracting, importing, and refining crude oil and operating service stations using property that Exxon\u2019s subsidiaries had possessed but the Cuban government had confiscated in 1960.<\/p>\n

The Cuban companies urged U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to dismiss the case, arguing that it was barred by the FSIA. Mehta\u00a0ruled<\/a> that the Helms-Burton Act does not itself overcome the immunity normally conferred by the FSIA. But, he concluded, one of the exceptions to that immunity \u2013 for lawsuits involving \u201ccommercial activity\u201d in the United States \u2013 did apply to one of the Cuban companies because of its operation of gas stations in Cuba that process money transfers from U.S. residents to Cuba and sell products imported from the United States.<\/p>\n

A divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed that the FSIA generally bars lawsuits against Cuban state-owned companies in U.S. courts. In\u00a0an opinion<\/a>\u00a0by Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, the court sent the case back to the lower court for it to take another look at whether the commercial-activity exception applies \u2013 namely, whether the Cuban company\u2019s money transfers and sales of U.S. goods at its gas stations have effects in the United States \u201cand whether the effects are sufficiently \u2018direct.\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n

Exxon appealed to the Supreme Court, which granted review last year. On Tuesday, the justices reversed.<\/p>\n

In his 22-page opinion, Kavanaugh emphasized that \u201cone Congress cannot bind another\u2014meaning that a later Congress always may repeal or modify an old law, or enact a new law that is exempt from the old law. In 1996, when Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, Congress was free to directly abrogate the foreign sovereign immunity of Cuban agencies and instrumentalities, thereby overriding the FSIA.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is exactly what it did, Kavanaugh concluded. Among other things, he wrote, the Helms-Burton Act creates a right to sue that \u201cexpressly applies against Cuban agencies and instrumentalities\u201d and was intended to \u201csupply a meaningful remedy\u201d against them \u2013 something that would generally not be possible if plaintiffs also had to satisfy one of the exceptions to the FSIA.<\/p>\n

In her dissent, Kagan countered that whether the Cuban-owned companies are immune from lawsuits in U.S. courts \u201cdepends on whether an FSIA exception is met.\u201d The majority\u2019s contrary conclusion, she said, rests \u201con the ground that a different law, the Helms-Burton Act, abrogates (in nonlegal speak, eliminates) the immunity that the FSIA may otherwise grant. The problem for the majority is that the bar for finding\u201d that Congress has repealed the general presumption of immunity in the FSIA \u201cis high, and the Helms-Burton Act falls short.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in Exxon Mobil v. Corporaci\u00f3n Cimex that a lawsuit by Exxon Mobil…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-721675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}