* Bougainville residents sued over activity linked to mine
* 9th Circuit rules after top U.S. court narrows law's reach
By Jonathan Stempel
June 28 (Reuters) - Benefiting from a recent U.S. SupremeCourt decision, Rio Tinto Plc has won the dismissal of anearly 13-year-old U.S. lawsuit accusing the Anglo-Australianmining company of complicity in human rights abuses on the SouthPacific island of Bougainville.
Friday's ruling by a majority of an 11-judge panel of the9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ends litigation begun in 2000.
Roughly 10,000 current and former Bougainville residents hadsought to hold Rio Tinto responsible for human rights violationsand thousands of deaths linked to polluting a copper and goldmine it once ran.
The ruling follows the Supreme Court's April 17 decision inKiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co, where the justiceslimited the sweep of a 1789 U.S. law that lawyers had used forroughly three decades to fight human rights abuses worldwide.
Five justices said the Alien Tort Statute was meant to coverinternational law violations occurring in the United States, andthat violations elsewhere must "touch and concern" U.S.territory "with sufficient force" to displace that presumption.
The Bougainville residents alleged that after workers in1988 began to sabotage the Rio Tinto mine, the company goadedPapua New Guinea's government to exact retribution and conspiredto impose a blockade, leading to thousands of civilian deaths.
On April 22, the Supreme Court threw out an earlier 9thCircuit ruling that let the lawsuit proceed, and asked it torevisit the matter in light of Kiobel.
Steve Berman, a lawyer for the Bougainville plaintiffs, didnot immediately respond to requests for comment.
He had asked the 9th Circuit to send the case back to theLos Angeles district court so that his clients could try toproceed with other claims, "sans invocation of the ATS."
Kiobel was also cited this week by a Virginia federal judgewho dismissed a lawsuit accusing defense contractor CACIInternational Inc of conspiring to torture detainees adecade ago at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The judge in that case said that because the alleged abuseoccurred outside the United States, he lacked jurisdiction toconsider claims by four former detainees. They plan to appeal.
The case is Sarei et al v. Rio Tinto Plc et al, 9th U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 02-56256.
