A group of Australian women who tried to sue Qatar Airways after they were allegedly strip-searched and subjected to invasive examinations have failed.
Five of them taking legal action were part of more than a dozen women who were ordered off a Sydney-bound flight in 2020.
Authorities were looking for the mother of a newborn baby who had been discovered in a bin at Hamad International Airport.
The women were reportedly examined to determine whether they had recently given birth, with one lawsuit claiming a mother was forced to be strip-searched while still holding her five-month-old son.
Multiple nations condemned the incident, which also included passengers from the UK and New Zealand, but an Australian court has found that Qatar Airways, which is state-owned, cannot be prosecuted there.
The women were seeking damages for “unlawful physical contact” and false imprisonment. They said they had suffered mental health impacts which included depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after the incident.
They filed the case in the Federal Court of Australia in 2021, under the multilateral treaty, the Montreal Convention, to which both Australia and Qatar have signed up to.
The treaty governs airline liability and allows a lawsuit to be brought in the country where a passenger lives.
But Justice John Halley found that airline staff would not have been able to influence the actions of the Qatari police, who removed the women from the plane, or the nurses, who examined the women in an ambulance.
He said this idea “can fairly be characterised as fanciful, trifling, implausible, improbable, tenuous”.
Justice Halley also threw out the case against Qatar Airway’s regulator as it is not able to be prosecuted in a foreign country.
However, the women were told they could pursue their claim against the Qatar Airways subsidiary Matar, which runs Hamad International Airport.
The group could argue that Matar owed them a duty of care to prevent the invasive searches.
Their lawyer Damian Sturzaker, from Marque Lawyers, said: “We are carefully reviewing the reasons given by the court and to the extent that there are grounds will consider all avenues for appeal.
“We note however that the claims against the airport operator, Matar, remain on foot. Our clients’ resolve to continue to agitate their claims remains undiminished.”
At the time of the controversy, Prime Minister Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz Al Thani tweeted: "We regret the unacceptable treatment of the female passengers... What took place does not reflect Qatar's laws or values."
