A human rights group sued Yahoo on Wednesday, accusing the Internet giant of abetting the torture of pro-democracy writers by releasing data that allowed China's government to identify them, writes The Washington Post.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, says the company was complicit in the arrests of 57-year-old Wang Xiaoning and other Chinese Internet activists. The suit says that in 2001 and 2002, Yahoo gave the goverment information that allowed it to identify and arrest Wang.
The suit, in trying to hold Yahoo accountable, could become an important test case. Advocacy groups are seeking to use a 217-year-old U.S. law to punish corporations for human rights violations abroad, an effort the Bush administration has opposed.

Yahoo said companies that do business in other countries have to follow the laws of that country or their employees could be subject to penalties. However, in investigating Google and Yahoo privacy rights concessions in 2006, MarketingVOX was told by both firms that they could not cite specific laws to which they believed they were conforming. Requests to confirm if the firms deemed Chinese Communist Party officials' desires to be the equivalent of law went unanswered.