In line with a number of recent court decisions upholding free speech rights of corporations, the District Columbia federal appeals court ruled that the SEC could not make public companies reveal that their products contained “conflict minerals.” The ruling overturned a provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. Human rights group argued for the provision as necessary for consumers and investors to know if brutal armed groups such as ones in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were funded by proceeds from minerals. (Reuters, August 18, 2015, by Sarah N. Lynch)
On the First Amendment issue, the panel split with the dissenting judge writing, “There should be no viable First Amendment objection to a requirement for an issuer to disclose the country of origin of a product’s materials—including, say, whether the product contains specified minerals from the [DRC] or an adjoining country, the site of a longstanding conflict financed in part by trade in those minerals. Such a requirement provides investors and consumers with useful information about the geographic origins of a product’s source materials. Indeed, our court, sitting en banc, recently relied on ‘the time-tested consensus that consumers want to know the geographical origin of potential purchases’ in upholding a requirement for companies to identify the source country of food products.” (The National Law Journal, August 18, 2015, by Mike Sacks)