Mohamad v. Palestinian Authority
The Supreme Court ruled that the Torture Victim Protection Act lets people sue only human beings, not organizations, for torture and extrajudicial killing carried out under a foreign government's authority.
Because the law's text repeatedly uses the word 'individual' to mean a natural person, the family of a man allegedly tortured and killed by Palestinian Authority intelligence officers cannot use this particular law to sue the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian Liberation Organization directly.
How it got here: A federal trial court dismissed the suit, the D.C. Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Azzam Rahim, a U.S. citizen, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and killed by Palestinian Authority intelligence officers while visiting the West Bank in 1995. His relatives later sued the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization under the Torture Victim Protection Act, a law letting people sue for torture and killing carried out under a foreign government's authority.
The question before the Court
Can a torture victim's family sue an organization, like the Palestinian Authority, under the federal law that lets people sue "an individual" for torture and killing abroad?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that the Torture Victim Protection Act's use of the word "individual" covers only human beings, not organizations like the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Court looked at the everyday meaning of "individual," noting that Congress and courts routinely use the word to mean a person, not a company or government body, and that other federal laws use broader words like "person" or "entity" when they mean to include organizations.
The Act's own text reinforced this: it uses "individual" five times in one sentence, mostly to describe victims, and only a human being can be tortured or killed. Since Congress chose not to write "person" or "entity" here, the Court held it deliberately limited lawsuits under this Act to individual wrongdoers, not the organizations that employed them.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Victims of torture and extrajudicial killing abroad, and their families, cannot use this specific federal law to sue the governments, militias, or organizations responsible — only the individual people who committed or ordered the abuse. That can matter a lot in practice, since perpetrators are often hard to identify, sue, or ever collect money from, unlike the organizations that employed them.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision resolving a circuit split over whether the Torture Victim Protection Act reaches organizational defendants. The lower court's dismissal of the claims against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization stands. Victims and their families seeking to hold organizations accountable for torture or killings abroad will need to look to other legal theories or statutes, since this particular law now clearly reaches only individual perpetrators.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the Palestinian Authority or similar entities could be sued under other laws, such as the Alien Tort Statute, or whether foreign sovereigns retain immunity in other contexts. It also left open whether estates or others could be wrongful-death claimants under the Act.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Scalia
Justice Scalia joined the Court's opinion in full except for Part III-B, which discussed the TVPA's legislative history. He agreed with the textual analysis and the outcome but apparently declined to endorse the majority's discussion of legislative history as supportive evidence.
Concurrence — Justice Breyer
Justice Breyer agreed with the result but argued the word 'individual' alone is ambiguous enough to permit either reading, including organizations. He concluded that the statute's legislative history, especially the sponsor's amendment explicitly meant to exclude corporations, is what actually resolves the case in the Court's favor.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court started from the word's ordinary meaning: dictionaries and everyday usage treat 'individual' as referring to a human being, not an organization, and the Court itself routinely uses the word this way to distinguish people from corporations.
- The Court noted that the federal Dictionary Act and many other statutes define 'person' to include corporations and associations 'as well as individuals,' showing that Congress treats 'individual' as a narrower, human-only term when it wants to include organizations it uses broader words.
- Applying the presumption that a repeated word in the same sentence carries the same meaning throughout, the Court observed that the Act uses 'individual' five times in one sentence, mostly to describe torture or killing victims — and only a human being can be a victim of torture or killing, reinforcing that the perpetrator reference means a human being too.
- The Court contrasted the Act's separate use of the broader term 'any person' for wrongful-death claimants, reasoning that Congress's choice to use a different, broader word there shows it knew how to include organizations when it wanted to, but chose not to for the perpetrator.
- The Court rejected the argument that Congress must have meant to match a supposed background norm of organizational tort liability, concluding that the statute's own text overrides any such general presumption.
- Finding no statutory indication that Congress intended 'individual' to reach beyond natural persons, and finding the drafting history (a deliberate swap from 'person' to 'individual' to exclude corporations) consistent with this reading, the Court concluded the Act creates liability against natural persons alone.