The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of a case brought against Catholic Church entities by plaintiffs, originally from Europe, who alleged they had been tricked as children into going to Australia in the 1940s in an effort to populate it with “pure white stock.”
The unanimous Dec. 8 decision in Ellul v. Christian Brothers, 11-1682-cv, held that the suit, brought under the Alien Tort Statute, had to be dismissed on jurisdictional grounds after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 133 S. Ct. 1659 (2013), applying the presumption against the extraterritorial application of U.S. law to claims under the statute.
