Federal Judge Dismisses Huawei Suit Challenging Government Contracts Ban

• Published Month : Friday, 21 Feb 2020 04:00 pm

The federal judge in Texas has dismissed litigation of Chinese technology giant Huawei's challenging a law of the United States that banned the government as well as its contractors from using Huawei’s equipment owing to security concerns.

The suit filed in March of 2019 by Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. against the U.S. government for banning its contractors from using Huawei equipment. However, on February 18, they got disappointed after the US judge dismissed the case before even starting the trial stating that the ban is not punitive and the federal government has all the right to take their business wherever they want to.  

Huawei’s dispute called the United States’ law barring defense contractors a “bill of attainder,” or in other words, a law that unethically targets an individual for punishing outside the due process. Moreover, bills of attainder are illegitimate under Article 1, section 9 that even bans “ex post facto” or else “after the fact” regulations.

As per the March 2019’s statement of Huawei, they believed that the ban, was called section 889, was on the basis of a number of wrong, unverified as well as untried schemes. The statement reaffirmed Huawei’s stand that they were neither been controlled nor even influenced by the government of China and further had claimed that the bar would probably hinder the 5G network’s development in the United States.

The governing came about a week after the U.S. Department of Justice accused Huawei of conspiracy towards committing racketeering as well as rehabilitated accusations that the tech giant had hidden efforts to steal the intellectual property from the companies of America followed by conducting illegal trade activities with Iran & North Korea. This was responded by Huawei, saying the government of United States is making use of the strengths of an entire country to ensue a private company, also the Department of Justice had tried to reintroduce civil cases as the criminal ones.

The chairman of Huawei Guo Ping described the move of filing the lawsuit a “last resort,” as the company was only left with an option of taking a legal action against the government.  However, Huawei is apparently “disappointed” by the dismissal of the trial and will go ahead seeking for further legal options.

In addition, Donald Trump administration has aggressively been urging Western associates to avoid the equipment for next-generation and 5G cellular networks developed by Huawei. As the administration is of the view that the company can probably give the backdoor access of sensitive data to Chinese government, however these allegations are been rejected by the company.