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Aug. 28, 2007

Yahoo has asked a U.S. court to dismiss a lawsuit it called political, and said its Chinese subsidiary obeyed all Chinese as well as all local laws when it provided information about some dissidents.

Filed in a federal court in San Francisco, Yahoo's suit originates from the wife of a Yahoo user jailed in China for promoting democracy online, and it accuses Yahoo of aiding and abetting torture and human rights violations.

Yesterday, Yahoo said in a statement "free speech rights as we understand them in the United States are not the law in China. Every sovereign nation has a right to regulate speech within its own borders."

Yahoo now has filed a motion to dismiss the case, saying it was compelled by Chinese law to hand over information to authorities including user registration information and even email content.

The lawsuit filed four months ago by the wife of Wang Xiaoning accuses Yahoo of helping Chinese officials track down her husband and of linking him and others to e-mails and specific online comments.

The lawsuit also involves Shi Tao, who was convicted more than two years ago of divulging state secrets after he posted a Chinese government order forbidding media organizations from marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on the Internet.

Overall, Yahoo was referred to ten times in a Chinese court verdict four years ago, that declared Wang guilty of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced him to ten years in prison.

Yahoo spokeswoman Kelley Benander said "this is a political and diplomatic issue, not a legal one."

She added "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 lawsuit filed under the auspices of the U.S. 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.

The suit 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.

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Source: Yahoo News