Yahoo must help jailed dissidents’ families
p2pnet news | Freedom:- It’s taken a very long time, but Yahoo has finally been forced to do something for two Chinese cyber dissidents thrown into jail for 10 years after Yahoo supplied information about them to the Chinese police.
Yahoo has continually denied responsibility, trying to claim it only turned over emails to comply with Chinese law.
CEO Jerry Yang (right) and general counsel Michael Callahan had to apologise to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee for not fully informing the panel about the case”.
But they said they hadn’t lied.
“Gao Qinsheng, the mother of jailed journalist Shi Tao, and Yu Lin, married to imprisoned cyber-dissident Wang Xiaoning, “spoke passionately” to the committee about Yahoo’s conduct,” said the Wall Street Journal, quoting Gao as saying, stating
I am very happy that I saw and I heard the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee and other congressmen criticize and condemn Yahoo for having lied to the Congress.
Now the company will have to provide legal and financial support to the families of the jailed Chinese dissidents, “to settle claims it committed human rights abuses when it gave China information that led to the men’s arrests,” says Bloomberg News, which has Yang saying in an email:
After meeting with the families, it was clear to me what we had to do to make this right for them, for Yahoo! and for the future.
Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning will feel much better, in their cells, when they learn of Yang’s comment.
On September 1, 2002, “Wang Xiaoning was taken into custody by police in Beijing on suspicion of ‘inciting subversion,’ says the Dui Hua Foundation, going on:
He was charged with using an online newsletter to attack the government and advocate multi-party elections, and he was alleged to have used his Yahoo! accounts to disseminate the political writings of his ‘Chinese Third Way Party’ to hundreds of recipients. Sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment by the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court on September 12, 2003, Wang is due for release from Beijing Number Two Prison on August 31, 2012.
And of Shi Tao:
These documents follow Dui Hua’s July 25 report on a police document in the case of Shi Tao revealing that Yahoo!’s representative office in Beijing had information that investigators were pursuing a case involving a leak of state secrets. User account information provided to police in response to that document was later used to convict Shi on state secrets charges and sentence him to ten years’ imprisonment. Previously released court documents have also shown that Yahoo! user account information was provided by the company in the course of police investigations into the subversion cases of Jiang Lijun (sentenced to four years’ imprisonment in November 2003) and Li Zhi (sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment in December 2003).
Continue to stay tuned. There’s more to come …..
Also See:
had to apologise – ahoo shamed in Chinese jail scandals, November 9, 2007
Bloomberg News – Yahoo Agrees to Support Families of Jailed Dissidents, November 13, 2007
Wall Street Journal – Families of Chinese Dissidents Speak Out Against Yahoo, November 7, 2007
Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning – Congress to investigate Yahoo, August 7, 2007
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November 13th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Ain’t it amazinf what billionaires can do and get away with
November 14th, 2007 at 9:34 am
To be completely honest this has been blown way of proportion. If ‘yahoo china’ receive a supena(or Chinese equivelent) they had to give the info over to the cops.
if it was ‘yahoo USA’ or yahoo.com that gave the information to china then there is a case for human rights abuse. The fact they lied about it then there is also a issue.