Rulings signal US courts may be more open to lawsuits accusing foreign officials of abuses

A U.S. court has given two top associates of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman until early November to start turning over any evidence in a lawsuit from a former senior Saudi intelligence official who says he survived a plot by the kingdom to silence him.

The order is among a spate of recent rulings suggesting U.S. courts are becoming more open to lawsuits seeking to hold foreign powers accountable for rights abuses, legal experts and advocates say. That is after a couple of decades in which American judges tended to toss those cases.

The long-running lawsuit by former Saudi intelligence official Saad al-Jabri accuses Saudi Arabia of trying to assassinate him in October 2018. The kingdom calls the allegation groundless. That's the same month the U.S., U.N. and others allege that aides of Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials killed U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose columns for The Washington Post were critical of the crown prince.

Al-Jabri's lawsuit asserts that the plot against him involved at least one of the same officials, former royal court adviser Saud al-Qahtani, whom the Biden administration has sanctioned over allegations of involvement in Khashoggi's killing.

The ruling is among a half-dozen recently giving hope to rights groups and dissidents that U.S. courts may be more open again to lawsuits that accuse foreign governments and officials of abuses — even when any wrongdoing took place abroad.

“More and more ... it seems like the U.S. courts are an opportunity to directly hold governments accountable,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, research director at Freedom House, a U.S.-based rights group that advocates for people facing cross-border persecution by repressive governments.

“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 more than we saw, definitely, even a few years ago.”

Khalid al-Jabri, a doctor who like his father lives in exile in the West for fear of retaliation by the Saudi government, said the recent ruling allowing his father's lawsuit to move forward will do more than help recent victims.

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

The Saudi Embassy in Washington acknowledged receiving requests for comment from The Associated Press in the al-Jabri 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 attorneys did not respond.

Past court motions by lawyers for the crown prince called al-Jabri a liar wanted in Saudi Arabia to face corruption allegations and said there was no evidence of a Saudi plot to kill him.

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

Khashoggi's killing and the events alleged by al-Jabri took place in a crackdown in the first years after King Salman and his son Prince Mohammed came to power in Saudi Arabia, after the 2015 death of King Abdullah. They detained critics and rights advocates, former prominent figures under the old king, and fellow princes for what the government often said were corruption investigations.

Al-Jabri escaped to Canada. As with Khashoggi, the lawsuit alleges the crown prince sent a hit team known as 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 officials found the allegations credible and said they remain under investigation.

Saudi Arabia detained a younger son and daughter of al-Jabri in what the family alleges is an effort to pressure the father to return to the kingdom.

Until now, efforts to sue Saudi officials and the kingdom over Khashoggi's and al-Jabri's cases have foundered. U.S. courts have said that Prince Mohammed himself has sovereign immunity under international law.

And judgments in civil cases against foreign governments and officials can have little effect beyond the reputational hit. Courts sometimes find in favor of the alleged victim by default when a regime or official fails to respond.

U.S. courts noted the alleged plot against al-Jabri targeted him at his home in Canada, not in the United States, although al-Jabri alleges the crown prince's aides used a network of Saudi informants in the U.S. to learn his whereabouts.

Late this summer, a federal appeals court in Washington reversed a dismissal of al-Jabri’s claims by a lower court. He is legally entitled to gather any evidence to see if there is enough to justify trying the case in the U.S., the appeals court said.

Federal courts ordered al-Qahtani and al-Asaker last month to start turning over all relevant texts, messages on apps and other communication 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 U.S. and other democracies have been favorite venues to bring human-rights cases against repressive governments. But rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court since 2004 had choked off such lawsuits in cases involving foreign parties, which often have little link to the U.S., Brunk said.

Lately, however, particularly strong lawsuits against foreign officials and governments have been gaining footholds in U.S. courts again, she said.

“There's been some very good lawyering here,” Brunk said of al-Jabri's long-running case.

Other lawsuits also have pushed ahead. A U.S. appeals court in San Francisco last month allowed the revival of a case by Chinese dissidents accusing the Chinese government of spying on them.

Rather than suing China, however, the dissidents targeted Cisco Systems, the Silicon Valley tech company they accused of developing the security system that allowed the spying.

A federal jury trial in Florida this summer found Chiquita Brands liable in the killings of Colombian civilians by a right-wing paramilitary group that the banana company acknowledged paying. Lawyers called it a first against a major U.S. corporation.

U.S. courts also have allowed human-rights-related lawsuits naming Turkey and India to move forward recently.

Some of the uptick in human-rights cases — those naming foreign officials and governments or targeting U.S. corporations — in U.S. courts again stems from plaintiffs "pursuing really promising, really creative” legal approaches, Brunk said.

Khalid al-Jabri said the family isn't seeking money in its lawsuit. They want justice for his father, he said, and freedom for his detained sister and brother.