Anti-Forced Labor Group Says Recent SCOTUS Decision Doesn't Sink Case on WRO Petition

Anti-forced labor nonprofit International Rights Advocates on July 11 addressed the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, which denied standing to anti-abortion medical associations and individual doctors challenging the FDA's regulation of mifepristone. In fending off the government's claims that IRAdvocates lacks standing to challenge CBP's delay in responding to a withhold release order petition, the advocacy group said its case is "fundamentally distinguishable" from Alliance (International Rights Advocates v. Alejandro Mayorkas, CIT # 23-00165).

The Supreme Court in Alliance rejected the claim from the medical groups and doctors that they suffered an injury for standing purposes based on the "costs they incurred to oppose the FDA's actions." The costs included funds used to conduct their own studies on mifepristone. The court said the defendants can't spend their way into standing and an organization can't establish standing when it diverts its resources in response to a defendant's actions.

IRAdvocates argued that the "critical distinction" between its case and Alliance is that the advocacy group is challenging CBP's failure to "take action in response to a lawful petition by IRAdvocates."

The nonprofit said it suffered "concrete organization injury" by "being required to expend additional time and funds to take further action due to CBP's failure to take required action" on the company's own petition, whereas the groups in Alliance "were merely engaged in general advocacy activities." Only groups like IRAdvocates that have legally filed a Section 307 petition alleging forced labor and then "expended funds" to get CBP to take "statutorily required action to enforce the law have standing" to challenge the delay, the brief said.

The agency's delay "directly impeded IRAdvocates’ core mission of ending the importation of cocoa produced with forced labor and directly caused it to suffer injury in the form of the diversion of additional resources to gather and present new evidence," the brief said. This injury isn't speculative and "has already occurred."

IRAdvocates filed its case at the Court of International Trade to claim that CBP violated the law in failing to respond to the group's petition alleging cocoa from Cote d'Ivoire is made with forced child labor. The government moved to dismiss the case, alleging that IRAdvocates failed to qualify for each of the constitutional requirements for standing to sue -- injury-in-fact, causation and redressability (see 2405060042).