Posted on 11/14/2007 3:22:25 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Yahoo to pay Chinese families
It settles with relatives of journalists jailed for dissent after it revealed their names to police.
By Alex Pham
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 14, 2007
A week after lawmakers shamed its executives as moral "pygmies," Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of two Chinese journalists thrown into jail for dissidence after the company disclosed their identities to local police.
Yahoo promised to pay the families' legal bills and to create a fund to "provide support to other political dissidents and their families," but the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company wouldn't disclose other details of the agreement.
The families' lawyer said settlement talks didn't begin in earnest until last week, when Yahoo's visibly humbled chief executive, Taiwan-born Jerry Yang, apologized and tried to defend the company's actions.
"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," Yang said in a statement released Tuesday. "At Yahoo, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet. That's why we are so committed to working to support free expression and privacy around the world."
But human-rights groups criticized Yahoo's requirement that the settlement's terms be kept confidential.
"Because this agreement has been kept secret, we can't be sure that Yahoo is taking the commitment to end censorship seriously," said Amy O'Meara, director of business and human rights at Amnesty International USA.
The controversy surrounds Yahoo's decision in 2004 to turn over to Chinese police, at their request, the names of journalists who had used Yahoo services to share material advocating democratic reform. The information led to the conviction of Wang Xiaoning, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for "incitement to subvert state power."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
And google did the same...
You’d think a Taiwanese would know better than to throw somebody under the China bus.
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