Court rules for Exxon Mobil in Cuban confiscation case

[El Presidente]

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in Exxon Mobil v. Corporación Cimex that a lawsuit by Exxon Mobil against Cuban state-owned companies for the confiscation of assets owned by subsidiaries of the oil giant’s predecessor can go forward.

Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained that the Helms-Burton Act, a federal law passed in 1996, cancels the immunity that the Cuban government and its companies would normally have, so that plaintiffs seeking to rely on that statute to sue them are not required to satisfy an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a federal law that generally prohibits lawsuits in U.S. courts against foreign governments and their “agencies and instrumentalities.” “Stacking an FSIA requirement on top of the Helms-Burton Act would thwart Congress’s design and directly contravene the President’s foreign policy judgments,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. She argued that “[n]othing in the text or ‘architecture’ of the Helms-Burton Act suggests that Congress abrogated the sovereign immunity of these defendants—much less that it did so with the requisite unmistakable clarity.”

https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-for-exxon-mobil-in-cuban-confiscation-case/