One could be forgiven for thinking that Anglo American PLC stands for Anglo-American plaintiffs lawyer claims. Current and former affiliates of the British mining conglomerate find themselves under assault by three shifting alliances of English, American and South African lawyers including the London human rights champion Leigh Day & Co. and the U.S. class action specialists Hausfeld and Motley Rice. These cases illustrate the globalization of the tort bar, while testing the viability of corporate human rights claims in two key common law jurisdictions at a time when the future of corporate human rights litigation in America is murky.
Retired black gold miners in southern Africa suffer from an epidemic of silicosis. Plaintiffs allege that’s because black miners were given the dustiest jobs with no protections. But South Africa and the United Kingdom present several obstacles to the miners’ lawyers. In South Africa, claims against mine operators, like Anglogold Ashanti, seemed to be pre-empted by a century-old workers’ compensation scheme. But the operator’s parent at the time of operation was Anglo American South Africa, and it’s unclear whether AASA qualifies as an English domiciliary that may be sued in England. Even more fundamentally, AASA says it can’t be reached in any nation because it did not directly employ the workers.
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