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BEIJING - In a brave legal action against the Great Firewall of China, a jailed political prisoner and his wife have sued Yahoo! in a US court, accusing the internet firm of contributing to torture by helping authorities identify dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.
Wang Xiaoning
was imprisoned in September 2003 for 10 years for the crime of "incitement to subvert state power" after he emailed electronic journals calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule in a Yahoo! Group in 2000 and 2001.
He was arrested by Chinese police in September 2002, and claims he was kicked and beaten during his detention.
Mr Wang and his wife Yu Ling accuse the Hong Kong unit of Yahoo! of providing mainland police with information linking Mr Wang to the postings, a claim that Yahoo! denies.
An engineer by profesion, Mr Wang hails from Shenyang in China's industrial northeast, and he once famously described the Communist Party as "outwardly democratic but inwardly despotic" in one of his essays.
Ms Yu, who lives in China still, is putting herself at risk by putting her name to the lawsuit.
The couple made their claim under US laws, which allow lawsuits from abroad to protect people against torture, and it is the first time anyone has used the legislation against an internet company for its activities in China.
The lawsuit was filed with help from the Washington-based World Organisation for Human Rights USA.
In a vivid illustration of how internet censorship in China works with complicity from the big international web companies, I was unable to open the organisation's website using Google as it is blocked by the authorities.
The plaintiffs are seeking damages and an injunction to stop Yahoo! identifying political dissidents to Chinese police.
"While in custody, Plaintiffs were subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including arbitrary, prolonged and indefinite detention, for expressing their free speech rights and for using the internet to communicate about democracy and human rights matters," ran the text of their law case, filed with a district court in northern California.
This lawsuit names Yahoo!, its Hong Kong subsidiary and Alibaba.com, China's largest e-commerce firm, as defendants.
California-based Yahoo! bought a 40 per cent stake in Alibaba in a £500 million deal in 2005.
China has 134 million internet users and is the world's second largest market, making it extremely attractive to the major web companies.
Google famously bowed down to the demands of the Chinese net nanny by allowing political censorship of its search engine.
Domestic internet giants such as Sohu and Baidu, along with China sites operated by Yahoo! and Microsoft, all routinely block searches on politically sensitive terms.
Blogs are regularly shut down, there are tens of thousands of net police monitoring the internet and searches are routinely blocked.
In 2005, Yahoo! was accused of supplying data that was used to jail Shi Tao, a journalist in Hunan province, for 10 years for leaking state secrets, apparently by using his Yahoo! email account.
Yahoo! sticks to its line that anyone doing business in China is forced to obey Chinese law, but human rights groups link it to a number of cases, including the case of Shi Tao, and the negative publicity has not helped the company's image.
Mr Shi's case was extremely high profile.
The business journalist was arrested in 2004 after he used his Yahoo email account to distribute a Communist Party document to an overseas pro-democracy site.
The human rights group Amnesty accuses Yahoo!, as well as Microsoft and Google, of facilitating or colluding in China's censorship of the net.
Amnesty rejects the argument that the companies are 'bringing the internet to China' as spurious, saying they are merely interested in getting into the market.
- INDEPENDENT