A lawsuit accusing California tech giant Cisco of facilitating the Chinese regime’s violent persecution of Falun Gong can now move forward to trial, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 7.

Adherents of Falun Gong, a faith group heavily persecuted in China since 1999, filed a lawsuit in 2011 against Cisco along with its two former executives, longtime CEO John Chambers and Fredy Cheung, Cisco’s then-vice president for greater China. The San Jose-headquartered firm, the lawsuit alleges, supplied technology to help China’s communist officials build a vast surveillance network to identify and track Falun Gong practitioners, and facilitate their subsequent arrest and torture.

Reversing a 2014 lower district court decision to dismiss the case, the federal appellate court found the plaintiffs’ allegations sufficient for the case to proceed.

“We conclude that Plaintiffs’ allegations, accepted as true, are sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the “douzheng” of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place,” ​​U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon wrote in the majority opinion, using the Chinese term for violent political campaigns the Chinese Communist Party instigates against perceived enemies.

Ms. Berzon said that the company’s actions, many of which took place on U.S. soil, constitutes “aiding and abetting” the Chinese regime’s abuses.

Terri Marsh, executive director of the Human Rights Law Foundation and a chief attorney for the plaintiffs, touted the development as a positive step toward curbing the persecution campaign.

“The message is clear: U.S. companies and their executive officers cannot further human rights abuses in China with impunity. They must be held accountable. They will be held accountable,” she told The Epoch Times.

The plaintiffs, citing Cisco’s marketing materials found on Chinese websites and elsewhere, allege that Cisco had acted as more than an unwitting commercial actor selling widgets to China. In its eagerness to win over the multi-billion dollar Chinese technology market, the complaint alleges, the company marketed itself to target dissidents and became a facilitator of the regime’s violent suppression of faith, designing and developing a comprehensive apparatus with U.S. technologies and talent in exchange for market access.

The system the plaintiffs referred to is Golden Shield, the Chinese security apparatus’s data-driven surveillance platform accessible nationwide in China. Cisco, they said, had designed, crafted and given critical assistance to implement and subsequently fine-tune the Golden Shield project at a time when the regime was incapable of developing one on its own.

In addition to customized software, Cisco also provided testing and ongoing “skill training” and “technical training” to Chinese agents tasked with persecuting Falun Gong so that they could master the use of the technology, according to the plaintiffs.

From San Jose, Cisco designed and manufactured key components such as integrated circuit chips for Golden Shield, and “Cisco intentionally incorporated the Falun Gong-specific signatures into security software upgrades at regular intervals to ensure Falun Gong activities and individuals were identified, blocked, tracked and suppressed,” the court filing states.

The resulting product was a surveillance system that can monitor Falun Gong adherents’ internet activities in real time to identify, round up, and torture members of the religious group. It also builds detailed and constantly updated profiles of suspected and known Falun Gong adherents that Chinese security officers can retrieve anywhere in the country, including their location, family, and contacts, aiding the regime in rounding up adherents and coercing them to renounce their faith, the plaintiffs allege.

All 13 plaintiffs, including a U.S. citizen, said they were identified via Golden Shield technology as participants of Falun Gong-related activities online and suffered detention for months to years at a time, during which they were subjected to torture.

“The physical torture the plaintiffs endured in detention and while imprisoned in forced labor camps included beatings with steel rods and shocking with electric batons, sleep deprivation, being forced to sit or stand for prolonged periods of time in painful positions, and violent force-feeding,” Ms. Berzon wrote. The authorities have allegedly used information stored in the Golden Shield system as tools to exert mental pressure during their torture sessions, she noted.

Ms. Berzon also noted Cisco’s allegedly repeated invocation of Party rhetoric regarding Falun Gong. The company had allegedly marketed its services as useful to the “douzheng” of Falun Gong in early 2000s trade shows in Beijing, and a Cisco training session available in 2012 allegedly used “viruses” and “pestilence” in describing Falun Gong, “mirroring Party propaganda,” she wrote for the panel.

Cisco didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times by press time.