Yahoo Accused of Cover-Up in Chinese Human Rights Case
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House committee says Yahoo provided data to China that lead to a journalist's jail term--and tried to hide its involvement.
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(!!!!!!!) Add them in yourself Yahoo! has asked a US court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of "aiding and abetting" acts of torture and other human rights abuses against Chinese dissidents. The company handed over information about its users to the Chinese government, which led to the arrests of the dissidents.â¦
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An industry group says it has won a new round in a court battle with Yahoo Inc.'s China arm, which is accused of helping online music pirates
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Chinese research assistant in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times has been detained on suspicion of revealing state secrets. The research assistant, Zhao Yan, was detained on Sept.
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Eleven companies have sued Yahoo's China division for about 5.5 million yuan ($710,690 USD) over accusations of copyright infringement, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said Wednesday.
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SANTA CLARA, California  - Yahoo Inc.  shareholders voted down proposals to tie executive pay to competitive performance and challenge the company's human rights policies in China at their annual meeting on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo wants a California court to dismissÂ a lawsuit brought against the company by jailed Chinese dissidents. In a filing Monday, Yahoo told the court that the lawsuit, which seeks to hold Yahoo accountable for the imprisonment and torture of the plaintiffs, should be tossed out various reasons, among which being that the U.S. justice system is the wrong venue for the case. "This is a lawsuit by citizens of China imprisoned for using the internet in China to express political views in violation of China law. It is a political case challenging the laws and actions of the Chinese government. It has no place in the American courts," the 51-page filing reads. After stating that Yahoo "deeply sympathizes with the plaintiffs and their families and does not condone the suppression of their rights and liberty by their government," the company states that it and its Chinese subsidiaries must comply with the laws of China. "Yahoo has no control over the sovereign government of the People's Republic of China, the laws it passes, and the manner in which it enforces its laws," reads the filing. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the California Northern District in April, alleges that Yahoo and Yahoo Hong Kong violated a series of U.S. and international laws by providing information to the Chinese government that led to the plaintiffs' arrest and torture. Yahoo's arguments for dismissal are flawed, said attorney Morton Sklar, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based World Organization for Human Rights USA, which represents the plaintiffs, including imprisoned journalists Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. Yahoo is trying to blame China's government and arguing that Yahoo can't be held responsible for what has happened, Sklar said. "It was Yahoo that put the torture device in the hands of the government of China by giving the Internet identification information to the Chinese officials," Sklar said. "If they hadn't done that, there couldn't have been any torture abuses." While it's true that any U.S. corporation doing business in a foreign country has to comply with that country's laws, the corporation also has to comply with U.S. laws and international legal standards, Sklar said. "That's what Yahoo overlooked," he said. This case is but one of a series of human rights and free speech controversies in which U.S. Internet companies like Yahoo, Google, and MicrosoftÂ find themselves in regarding their operations in China. In addition to human rights groups and press watchdog organizations, these Internet companies have been criticized by U.S. lawmakers, by some of their own investors and by individuals. While Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and others in their position argue they need to comply with local laws, they also say that real progress on Internet issues of privacy, censorship, and human rights require government-to-government agreements supported by collaboration with industry players and human-rights organizations and leading to global standards of operation. Asked for comment about its dismissal request, a Yahoo spokeswoman said that while Yahoo believes "deeply" in human rights and "strongly" supports freedom of expression and privacy worldwide, it believes the case has no legal merits. "This is a political and diplomatic issue, not a legal one," she wrote. "The real issue here is the plaintiffs' outrage at the behavior and laws of the Chinese government. The U.S. court system is not the forum for addressing these political concerns." In its filing Monday, Yahoo outlines several reasons for the dismissal of the case. It argues that litigating the case "risks violating international law principles of sovereignty, interfering with U.S. foreign policy, and jeopardizing the U.S. law enforcement interests." Yahoo also argues that the plaintiffs have failed to state a claim under the Alien Tort Statute, the Torture Victim Protection Act, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and the California laws on which they rely. Moreover, the plaintiffs' claims contravene federal, California, and international law, which protect defendants from civil liability for communicating with law enforcement officials regarding investigations, according to Yahoo. In their amended complaint, filed July 30, the plaintiffs allege Yahoo and Yahoo Hong Kong violated a series of U.S. and international laws, including torture, arbitrary arrest, prolonged detention, and forced labor as a violation of the international Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act. They also allege violation of the California Business and Professional Code for unfair business practices and violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act for unlawful access to stored communications. The plaintiffs seek, among other things, awards of a variety of damages; declaration that defendants violated international law; a requirement that defendants actively help to secure the release of detained plaintiffs; and an injunction barring the defendants from "any further disclosures of user information" to prevent future abuses. The complaint states that Wang Xiaoning was arrested and unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and prosecuted for publishing and circulating through the Internet electronic journals and articles that supported democratic reform in China and for communicating with other democracy advocates. "He is serving a ten-year sentence at Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison, a forced labor prison for political prisoners, under severe conditions of prolonged confinement that are highly abusive in nature. He has served almost four years of his ten-year sentence, and has been imprisoned for almost five years," the complaint reads. Meanwhile, Shi Tao was arrested and unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and prosecuted for e-mailing messages, notes, and journalistic dispatches describing government restrictions on journalists imposed in connection with the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy advocates, according to the complaint. "He currently is serving the third year of a 10-year sentence for 'divulging state secrets abroad' at Chishan Prison of Hunan Province, a high-security prison with a documented system of forced labor and torture, and has been in detention for almost four years," the complaint reads. Their arrests and detainment of these two Chinese citizens were "inflicted upon" them as a result of Yahoo and Yahoo Hong Kong's actions to aid and abet Chinese government officials "in committing these major human rights abuses," the complaint reads. The judge will hold a hearing on Yahoo's dismissal request on November 1st at 2 p.m. Pacific Time.
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Did Yahoo break U.S. law by supplying confidential information about dissidents that led to their imprisonment and torture by the Chinese government? On Monday, the Internet giant asked a federal judge in Oakland, California to dismiss a lawsuit that claims it did.
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Internet search engine Google has been accused of censoring the Chinese news service that it launched two weeks ago. Web hosting company Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) reported that Google&#39;s Chinese news
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. Congressman Chris Smith said that top American technology companies are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, writing Saturday in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. "There is enormous profit potential, but entering the Chinese market means challenging a repressive regime on basic human rights tenets. Sadly, some of America's largest tech firms are currently failing this new test of corporate responsibility," wrote Smith, a Republican from New Jersey and a member of the Foreign Services Committee. Smith said that representatives from Yahoo, Google, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft appeared at an April, 2006 Congressional hearing he convened and "they all acknowledged that their companies have enabled dictatorships to censor democracy and human rights promotion on the Internet." He also said that "Yahoo and Cisco have evenÂ helped the Chinese government incarcerate Internet usersÂ for pro-democracy activity." Court documents and evidence from human rights groups have shown that Yahoo's Hong Kong subsidiary, Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong), cooperated with Chinese police in cases against journalist Shi Tao and political activist Li Zhi, and that material provided by the company may have led to their conviction. Shi was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, Li to eight years. In January, Smith re-introduced "The Global Online Freedom Bill of 2007," would give individuals like Shi and Li the right to seek redress in U.S. courts, if they believe their freedom of expression was compromised by a U.S. company. Internet companies would be required to inform the Office of Global Internet Freedom -- to be created if the bill is signed into law -- of keywords and search parameters they are filtering. They must also notify the Office of any restrictions on Internet information access with which they must comply in order to do business in a foreign country. Companies can be fined up to $2 million for violation of these principles, with individuals liable for up to $100,000. The bill provides for $50 million to establish the Office of Global Internet Freedom. The bill cited nine countries, including China, Iran, and North Korea, for blocking, restricting, and monitoring the Internet and its citizens' use of it, according to a January 8 statement from Smith's office. Later in January, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Vodafone Group agreed to develop aÂ code of conductÂ with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights. The parties involved said that they would develop a framework that would hold signatories accountable for their actions in the areas of freedom of expression and privacy rights. Eighteen NGOs are participating in the guidelines' development, including: Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; Business for Social Responsibility; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Human Rights Watch; and Reporters Without Borders. One observer felt the tech firms were now between a rock and a hard place. "Technology companies now have the unenviable position of moving into the media realm, which is tightly controlled in China," said Danny Levinson, publisher of BDL Media's ChinaCSR.com and the China CSR monthly magazine. "When dealing with corporate social responsibility in China, foreign technology companies are easier targets than firms in other sectors because they are much more high profile than, say, the mining companies providing poor labor oversight and textile companies polluting the environment," Levinson said.
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'The end of anonymous blogging' Microsoft and Yahoo! have signed a pact with the Chinese government that "encourages" the big name web players to record the identities of bloggers and censor content. So says Reporters Without Borders, an organization that fights for journalistic rights across the globe.â¦
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BRUSSELS, Dec 7 (IPS) - The European Union must raise the issue of human  rights abuse in China when its leaders meet their Chinese  counterparts at a summit this week, say leading human rights  groups.
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Entertainment Base, which claims to be China's largest Web site for original music, sued Yahoo China in the Beijing Second Intermediate People's Court over the copyright of 13 songs, and seeking $314,703 in damages.
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Yahoo Inc&#39;s popular Internet photo site Flickr.com was blocked in China, the company said Wednesday, amid reports that authorities restricted access due to photos of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
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HONG KONG -- China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet, Yahoo Inc. said Monday, a day after the mother of a Chinese reporter announced she was suing the U.S. company for helping officials imprison her son.
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China accused the United States of hypocrisy on Thursday in its annual response to Washington's criticism of Beijing's human rights record, saying it had no right to blacken the name of other countries.
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Microsoft Corp , Google Inc   and Yahoo Inc  have breached the Universal  Declaration on Human Rights in colluding with China to censor  the Internet, Amnesty International said on Thursday.