Eight years have passed since Chiquita, the global fruit giant, was convicted on felony charges of having financed terrorism in Colombia. The company paid fines to the U.S. government, but for more than a decade, victims have been denied damages in U.S. courts.

The reason? It’s simply not yet clear whether U.S. law guarantees foreigners the right to sue companies under U.S. jurisdiction, even for crimes committed, in part, in the United States.

The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to resolve that. On Friday the Court will conference Cardona v. Chiquita Brands International, a class-action suit brought on behalf of some 4,000 victims of state-sponsored terrorism in Colombia. Legal experts say the case provides the ideal vehicle to decide whether U.S. civil law can hold multinationals accountable for overseas wrongdoing.

At issue is the scope of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), an eighteenth-century anti-piracy law re-appropriated in the 1980s as a domestic enforcement mechanism for international human rights. The Court has already determined that only real live people—as opposed to corporate “persons”—can be brought to justice for international torture under the Torture Victims Protection Act. So proponents see the ATS as one of the last available legal provisions to hold corporations financially liable for the human rights performance of their global operations.

The fate of ATS claims against Dole Fruit and Drummond coal, other U.S. multinationals linked to paramilitary violence in Colombia, could hinge on the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Chiquita case. The ATS has also been invoked by plaintiffs from Guatemala, Indonesia, and Burma with similar allegations of U.S. corporate malfeasance.