Yahoo sued in US court for giving user data to China

SAN FRANCISCO: The wife of a Yahoo user jailed in China for promoting democracy online is suing the Internet search engine company for helping Chinese officials track him down and convict him.   

A suit filed in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday by the wife of Wang Xiaoning accuses Yahoo of "aiding and abetting" torture and human rights violations by linking her husband and others to email and online comments.   

Yahoo was referred to 10 times in the Chinese court verdict on September 12, 2003 that declared Wang guilty of "incitement to subvert state power" and sentenced him to a decade in prison.   

"I feel very angry," Wang's wife, Yu Ling, said after a news conference on Thursday announcing the filing of the suit.   

"Yahoo betrayed my husband for their business interests. They literally destroyed my family. All my husband did was express his political views."   

The suit filed under the auspices of the US Alien Tort Statute 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.   

Wang is also demanding cash damages to be determined at trial, according to her lead attorney, Morton Sklar of the World Organization for Human Rights.