Dissident Ning Xianhua sues Verizon, claiming Yahoo’s handover of private data to China led to prison and torture

A US-based Chinese dissident has sued the Verizon Communications subsidiary that owns Yahoo, citing allegations that former Yahoo executives handed over private user data to the Chinese government, resulting in the activist’s detention and prosecution.

Ning Xianhua, who is described in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday as a participant in the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989, “suffered brutal beatings and torture for years” in China as a result of Yahoo sharing data taken from his email account with authorities in exchange for market access, his lawyers said.

Ning, 69, a labour rights activist, was convicted for subverting state power in 2004 and served seven years in prison. After leaving China in 2016, he sought asylum in the United States, where he lives in New York.

Government officers involved in his case never disclosed to him the source of the information used in his prosecution, Ning said. But a confidential prosecutorial memorandum that was used in Ning’s case and recently obtained by his lawyer in China had revealed Yahoo’s participation in “effecting his arrest, torture and imprisonment”, said Kevin Parker, a lawyer representing Ning.

The memorandum “lays out the contents of Mr Ning’s emails in incredible detail and suggests that the only source of that information was Yahoo given that the [People’s Republic of China] could not have obtained that information from other sources,” said Parker, who declined to share a copy of the document.

Ning’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, is based on claims under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which permits non US-citizens to seek restitution for human rights abuses conducted overseas with the assistance of American entities.