By DPA
San Francisco : Leading US Internet site Yahoo has strongly denied allegations that it “aided and abetted” torture in China by releasing information that led to the imprisonment of four dissidents and anti-government bloggers in the communist state.
The allegations were made in a lawsuit filed in April by the Washington-based World Organization for Human Rights USA.
The organisation alleged that Yahoo’s Hong Kong subsidiary handed over information that led to the imprisonment of dissidents, including writer Wang Xiaoning, on charges of incitement to subvert state power.
Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison in September 2003, due in part to writings distributed over the Internet. Yahoo gave his e-mail account information and IP address to the Chinese government, according to the court documents.
Another of the dissidents was Shi Tao, who was convicted in 2005 of divulging state secrets after he posted online a Chinese government order forbidding media organisations from marking the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising.
In a filing Monday with a court in San Francisco, Yahoo asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed, arguing that the legal action was “a political case challenging the Chinese government” which had no place in the US courts.
Yahoo’s filing said that it had merely been obeying the law when it gave Chinese authorities the registration information of a user who had promoted democracy in a forum.
Justin Nolin of the Human Rights Centre points out that Yahoo is far from the first US-based technology company to be accused of kowtowing to Chinese authorities and aiding human rights abuses.
Other companies that have faced similar allegations include Google, which last year agreed to self-censorship of its Chinese language search engine to remove sites deemed unpalatable by the Chinese government.
Microsoft has also been blasted for its China policies.
According to Amnesty International, the software giant sells technology to the Chinese government that allows it to maintain some of the most restrictive censorship practices in the world.
Thus, Internet users in China draw a blank when they type in words such as democracy, human rights and the banned Chinese religious sect Falun Gong. Sites like The New York Times, BBC News and those linked to Tiananmen Square are also frequently off limits.
Nolin hopes that the Yahoo case will prompt these companies to reassess their policies.
“It’s a test case,” she said. “If it goes through, it would send a very strong signal to companies that they have to be responsible for human rights no matter where they operate around the world.”
But Yahoo sees it differently and legal experts say it would take a dramatic change in US jurisprudence for the plaintiffs to win their case.
Yahoo contended that it was just following local law and had no choice but to comply with the authorities.
“This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the Internet in China to express political views in violation of China law,” the company said. “It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government. It has no place in the American courts.”
While Yahoo “deeply sympathized” with the plaintiffs and their families and “did not condone the suppression of their rights and liberty by their government,” the company said it had “no control over the sovereign government of China, the laws it passes and the manner in which it enforces its laws”.
The dissidents had “assumed the risk of harm when they chose to use Yahoo China e-mail and engage in activity they knew violated Chinese law,” the company said in its filing.
Until now US courts have been unwilling to get involved in cases where foreign nationals fall foul of laws in their own countries.
But Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, is confident that the courts will find that there is no excuse for Yahoo’s behaviour.
“This kind of an excuse has not been available to anyone involved in human rights abuses since the genocide of World War II,” he said. “People have understood that it’s necessary for all individuals to question the orders, requests and commands that are made of them by governments.”
Sklar also voiced hope that the publicity of the case would help prompt change – including widespread shareholder action that would force the companies to uphold some of the tenets of democracy and free speech.
But there’s little sign of that working. Last week, Yahoo and MSN China signed a code of conduct for their blogging operations that committed them to protecting the interests of the Chinese state, and which “encourages” them to register the real names, addresses and other personal details of bloggers, and retain this information. The firms also committed to delete any “illegal or bad messages”.