|
The Internet giant Yahoo has asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit
accusing it of "aiding and abetting" torture by giving
Chinese authorities information about dissidents that led to their
imprisonment.
Yahoo on Monday filed the motion for dismissal, calling the case
"political" and insisting its Chinese subsidiary was
compelled by local law to hand over information to authorities,
including user registration information and email content.
"Free speech rights as we understand them in the United States
are not the law in China," Yahoo said. "Every sovereign
nation has a right to regulate speech within its borders."
The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in San Francisco in April
by the wife of Wang Xiaoning, a Yahoo user jailed in China for
promoting democracy online.
The suit accuses Yahoo of helping Chinese officials track down her
husband and of linking her husband and others to email and online
comments.
Regarding the suit, Yahoo said that the "plaintiffs' criminal
judgments do not show that defendants divulged plaintiffs'
identities, caused them to be investigated, or provided proof
essential to their convictions."
The dissidents "assumed the risk of harm when they chose to use
Yahoo China email and group list services to engage in activity they
knew violated Chinese law."
Yahoo was referred to 10 times in the 2003 Chinese court verdict
that declared Wang guilty of "incitement to subvert state
power" and sentenced him to a decade in prison.
The suit also involves Shi Tao, who was convicted in 2005 of
divulging state secrets after he posted a Chinese government order
forbidding media organizations from marking the anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square uprising on the Internet.
"This is a political and diplomatic issue, not a legal
one," Yahoo spokeswoman Kelley Benander said, according to the
Los Angeles Times.
"The real issue here is the plaintiffs' outrage at the behavior
and laws of the Chinese government. The US court system is not the
forum for addressing these political concerns."
The suit filed under the auspices of the US Alien Tort Claims Act
and the Torture Victim Protection Act names Chinese Internet search
engine Alibaba as a defendant along with Yahoo's operations in China
and Hong Kong.
It asks for compensatory damages and calls on the court to order
Yahoo to stop cooperating with requests by China to identify
Internet users and to pressure the government there to release Wang
and others imprisoned as the result of such shared information.
--AFP
|
