Can Egypt's Telecom Giants Be Sued In the US? 105
bedouin writes "In April, the Egyptian Centre for Housing Rights filed a lawsuit on behalf of other plaintiffs against the three telecommunications companies (and a number of current and former Egyptian officials) seeking compensation for the damages they suffered due to the shutdown of communications. The case is ongoing. An interesting question is whether any of these companies could also be sued in US courts."
Re:Maybe but that isn't the point (Score:5, Informative)
One of the companies is Vodafone, who own 45% of Verizon, so there are plenty of US assets to get hold of.
They can (Score:5, Informative)
There's some decent caselaw and precedent if anyone's intersted - Wiki has a little summary [wikipedia.org] that shouldn't take too long to browse through. Long story short, it's certainly possible but there are some pretty high barriers to use (see specifically the ruling in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum [ed.ac.uk] [pdf]). It's a lot easier if its person on person, moreso if one of those is physically in the US, but it extends to corporations and non-residents as well.
Re:Maybe but that isn't the point (Score:5, Informative)
Should the US be using international trade sanctions to enforce its own laws in other countries?
Too late, the US has been doing this for some time. How do you think the rash of DMCA-like laws have been forced on other countries in recent years? Where I live, file sharing of even of copyrighted works among friends was not illegal (no profit motive) until the US forced DMCA-like laws to be adopted by our government. It was surely not the population who voted this into law and made a large percentage of the population criminal overnight. As an American ex-pat living abroad, this brings me no small amount of shame.