Ruling suggests U.S. courts may be more open to lawsuits accusing foreign officials of abuse

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. court has given two senior aides to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman until early November to begin turning over any evidence in a lawsuit filed by a former top Saudi intelligence official who says he was conspiring to conspire with the kingdom silence survives him.

The order is among a series of recent rulings that suggest U.S. courts are becoming increasingly open to lawsuits aimed at holding foreign powers accountable for rights abuses, legal experts and advocates say. This came after a few decades in which American judges tended to reject these cases.

Former Saudi intelligence official Saad al-Jabri’s long-running lawsuit accuses Saudi Arabia of attempting to assassinate him in October 2018. The kingdom considers the claim to be unfounded. That same month, the U.S., U.N. and others allege that aides to Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials killed U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose columns for the Washington Post criticized the crown prince.

Al-Jabri’s lawsuit alleges that the conspiracy against him involved at least one of the same officials, former royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani, against whom the Biden administration has imposed sanctions over allegations of involvement in Khashoggi’s killing .

The ruling is one of a half-dozen that have recently given human rights groups and dissidents hope that U.S. courts might again be more open to lawsuits accusing foreign governments and officials of abuses – even if wrongdoing occurred abroad.

“More and more … it seems like the U.S. courts are an opportunity to hold governments directly accountable,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director at Freedom House, a U.S.-based human rights group that advocates for people crossing borders Governments are subject to persecution through repression.

“It’s an uphill battle,” especially in cases where little of the alleged harassment took place on U.S. soil, Gorokhovskaia noted. “But it’s definitely more than we saw just a few years ago.”

Khalid al-Jabri, a doctor who, like his father, lives in exile in the West for fear of retaliation from the Saudi government, said the latest ruling allowing his father’s lawsuit to continue will do more than help the latest victims.

It “will hopefully, in the long run, cause oppressive regimes to think twice about cross-border repression on U.S. soil,” the younger al-Jabri said.

The Saudi Embassy in Washington confirmed that it had received requests from The Associated Press for comment on al-Jabri’s case but did not immediately respond. Lawyers for one of the two Saudis named in the case, Bader al-Asaker, declined to comment, while al-Qahtani’s lawyers did not respond.

Previous court filings by lawyers for the crown prince called al-Jabri a liar wanted in Saudi Arabia on corruption charges and said there was no evidence of a Saudi plot to kill him.

The Saudi government, meanwhile, said the killing of Khashoggi by Saudi agents at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was a “rogue operation” carried out without the crown prince’s knowledge.

Khashoggi’s murder and the events alleged by al-Jabri took place in a crackdown in the early years after King Salman and his son Prince Mohammed came to power in Saudi Arabia, following the death of King Abdullah in 2015. They attracted criticism and Human rights activists, former prominent figures under the old king and fellow princes were arrested for corruption investigations, the government often said.

Al-Jabri fled to Canada. As with Khashoggi, the lawsuit claims the crown prince sent a hit team called the “Tiger Squad” to kill him there, but claims the plot was foiled when Canadian officials questioned the men and examined their luggage. Canada has said little about the case, although a Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigator has testified that officers found the allegations credible and said they remain under investigation.

Saudi Arabia has arrested a younger son and daughter of al-Jabri. The family claims this is an attempt to pressure the father to return to the kingdom.

So far, all attempts to sue Saudi officials and the kingdom over the Khashoggi and al-Jabri cases have failed. US courts have declared that Prince Mohammed himself enjoys sovereign immunity under international law.

And verdicts in civil cases against foreign governments and officials can have little impact beyond reputational damage. Courts sometimes rule in favor of the alleged victim when a regime or official fails to respond.

US courts found that the alleged plot against al-Jabri targeted his home in Canada and not the United States, although al-Jabri claims the crown prince’s aides used a network of Saudi informants in the US to discover his whereabouts to find out.

Late this summer, a federal appeals court in Washington reversed a lower court’s dismissal of al-Jabri’s claims. He had the legal right to gather all the evidence to see whether it was sufficient to justify hearing the case in the United States, the appeals court said.

Federal courts last month ordered al-Qahtani and al-Asaker to begin turning over all relevant texts, app messages and other communications in the case by Nov. 4.

It’s an “exciting development,” said Ingrid Brunk, a professor of international law at Vanderbilt University and an expert in international litigation.

Courts in the United States and other democracies are popular venues for human rights lawsuits against repressive governments. But U.S. Supreme Court rulings since 2004 have stifled such lawsuits in cases involving foreign parties that often have little connection to the U.S., Brunk said.

Recently, however, particularly serious lawsuits against foreign officials and governments have again gained a foothold in US courts, she said.

“There was a very good legal team here,” Brunk said of the long-running al-Jabri case.

Other lawsuits also moved forward. A U.S. appeals court in San Francisco last month allowed the reopening of a case by Chinese dissidents who accused the Chinese government of spying on them.

Instead of suing China, however, the dissidents targeted Cisco Systems, the Silicon Valley technology company they accused of developing the security system that enabled the espionage.

In a federal court case in Florida this summer, Chiquita Brands was found responsible for the killings of Colombian civilians by a right-wing paramilitary group for which the banana company had admitted responsibility. Lawyers called it a first against a large US company.

US courts have also recently allowed human rights lawsuits naming Turkey and India.

Part of the increase in human rights cases — those naming foreign officials and governments or targeting U.S. companies — in U.S. courts is, in turn, due to plaintiffs pursuing “really promising, really creative” legal approaches, Brunk said .

Khalid al-Jabri said the family is not seeking money in their lawsuit. They want justice for his father, he said, and freedom for his imprisoned sister and brother.