Journalists lawsuit against Yahoo! grows

Jailed Chinese reporter Shi Tao seeks compensation from major U.S. Internet company for identifying him to the government

By Melissa Wang
AsiaMedia Staff Writer

Shi Tao, a jailed Chinese reporter and poet, has joined a U.S. lawsuit against Yahoo! Inc. for providing user information to the Chinese government. The suit, filed by the World Organization for Human Rights USA in April, claims that Yahoo! provided identifying information of Internet users to Chinese authorities which led to the arrest of several Chinese dissidents, including Shi.

Shi, a former writer for the financial publication Contemporary Business News and a recipient of this year’s Golden Pen of Freedom Award, was sentenced to ten years in prison by a Chinese court in 2004 for giving state secrets to foreigners via his Yahoo! email account. He joins dissident Wang Xiaoning, imprisoned in 2003 for subversion, and Wang’s wife in seeking compensation from the California-based Internet company for helping in the Chinese government to convict them.

Shi’s conviction stemmed from an e-mail that he sent to a pro-democracy group in the United States regarding media restrictions in China. Yahoo! gave Shi’s anonymous Internet user ID and the location from where he sent his e-mails to the Chinese government upon request. Yahoo! maintains that it had to comply with local laws and hand over the information.

“Companies doing business in China must comply with Chinese law or its local employees could be faced with civil and criminal penalties,” Yahoo! said in a statement.

“Yahoo is distressed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet,” the statement said. “We believe deeply in human rights, and as a company built on openness, we strongly support free expression and privacy globally.”

But the World Organization for Human Rights USA disagrees.

“We are filing this lawsuit because Yahoo! should not just give up their user information. This means that Yahoo is giving up free speech,” Morton Sklar, Executive Director of nonprofit group filing the suit, told AsiaMedia on the phone from Washington, DC. “Yahoo! needs to follow the U.S. and international laws regarding human rights. It should not simply follow whatever the Chinese government demands.”

The suit seeks an end Yahoo!’s practice of divulging Internet user information when human rights violations could result and asks that the company assist in securing the release of prisoners that it helped to jail, including Shi.

“Shi Tao’s participation is symbolic. It demonstrates that the practices of Yahoo! do not just affect two or three people. It affects many more,” Sklar said.

On Tuesday, Yahoo! shareholders rejected a proposal by the company to stop revealing user information or to develop a committee to review its policies in China with regards to human rights. Yesterday, Reuters reported that Flickr.com, an online photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo!, was blocked in China, possibly to keep Internet users from accessing images of the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre.

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