Fox News senior legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said Wednesday that China could be held accountable for allegedly allowing the coronavirus to spread through class action lawsuits against its state-controlled firms.
Napolitano said the U.S. cannot directly sue China for liabilities due to the principle of “sovereign immunity, which the United States recognizes and that basically insulates all governments from being sued no matter what they do.”
“The issue here is how can China be punished?” the judge told “Fox & Friends First.”
“China has a lot of assets in the United States, some of the assets here are owned not by the government itself but by corporations in which the government is the principal shareholder,” Napolitano said. “You can expect to see soon class actions, that is lawsuits brought in United States federal courts against these sovereign corporations, it’s not the government again but it’s corporations that the government controls, that own real estate in the United States. The court would seize the real estate until the litigation is resolved.” (RELATED: China Appointed To UN Human Rights Council Panel Despite Appalling Human Rights Record)
The Fox News expert explained that some critics have said China’s behavior around the COVID-19 outbreak amounted to “criminal negligence”
China “knew about this for months, which knew how serious it was, which arrested the doctor who discovered it and revealed it because he had the temerity to tell the truth,” said Napolitano.
Napolitano added that it would not be possible to bring China before the International Criminal Court because neither China nor the United States recognize the jurisdiction of that organization. (RELATED: Mike Pompeo Blames Chinese Communist Party For Global ‘Suffering’ Due To COVID-19)
A woman wearing protective gear adjusts her glasses in Wuhan, Hubei province, the epicentre of China’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, March 30, 2020. REUTERS/Aly Song
“If China were and if the United States was a member of the criminal court, the Chinese officials could actually be prosecuted there, they could be arrested by Interpol and incarcerated,” he said. “Never going to happen: in part because it would start a war and in part because there is no legal authority to do that to the officials of a country that didn’t accept the treaty.”
Critics accuse China of covering up evidence and testimony related to the coronavirus after the disease broke out in the city of Wuhan. The Communist Party leadership is suspected of gagging physicians who tried to warn the world about the potential devastation of the COVID-19 virus and reports suggest the regime has been systematically lying about the number of people killed by the disease.