Torture Victim Protection Act of 1992

The Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (TVPA), 106 Stat. 73 (1992), is a statute that allows for the filing of civil suits, in the United States, against individuals who, acting in an official capacity for any foreign nation, committed torture and/or extrajudicial killing. The statute requires a plaintiff to show exhaustion of local remedies in the location of the crime, to the extent that such remedies are "adequate and available." It does not require that a plaintiff be a U.S. citizen.

Legal Issues

The TVPA has been used by victims of terrorism to sue foreign states that have been designated by the U.S. as state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iraq (which has since been removed from the list) and Iran. See Daliberti v. Republic of Iraq, 97 F.Supp.2d 38 (D.D.C. 2000); Weinstein v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 184 F.Supp.2d 13 (D.D.C. 2002). The Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA), UnitedStatesCode|28|1602|1911, prohibits foreign states from being sued in U.S. courts for most non-commercial issues. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), UnitedStatesCode|28|1605(a)(7), created an exception to the FSIA, allowing U.S. nationals to sue foreign states if the state has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and if the plaintiff's injury has been caused by the state's support of a terrorist organization. Following the passage of the AEDPA, numerous suits have been filed against state sponsors of terrorism, particularly Iran. Because some courts have held that the AEDPA does not create a cause of action against foreign states, plaintiffs have used the TVPA and the AEDPA in concert, first using the AEDPA to provide an exception to a foreign state's sovereign immunity, and then using the TVPA to provide a cause of action. See Debra M. Strauss, "Enlisting the U.S. Courts in a New Front: Dismantling the International Business Holdings of Terrorist Groups Through Federal Statutory and Common-Law Suits", 38 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 679, 710 (2005).