Five Australian women who were forcibly removed from a Qatar Airways flight and subjected to invasive physical exams at Doha airport in 2020 have won the right to sue the airline directly.
A federal court overturned a previous ruling that dismissed their case.
According to their lawyer, the women, whose names remain confidential, were among dozens of women taken off multiple flights and subjected to nonconsensual bodily searches after a newborn was found abandoned at the Hamad International Airport in Doha in October 2020.
The five Australian women were ordered off Qatar Airways flight 908 to Sydney and taken to ambulances on the tarmac where nurses conducted physical examinations without their consent.
“She told me to pull my pants down and that [she] needed to examine my vagina,” one woman said at the time. “I said, ‘I’m not doing that’, and she didn’t explain anything to me. She just kept saying, ‘We need to see it, we need to see it’.”
The incident triggered global outrage and was condemned by Australia’s then foreign minister as a “grossly disturbing, offensive, concerning set of events.”
An Australian government spokesperson said at the time that up to 10 flights could have been affected by the searches.
The five women had sought to sue Qatar Airways for damages related to “unlawful physical contact” and pursued claims of assault and false imprisonment and battery against the airport operator, Matar, and the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority.
But federal court judge John Halley dismissed the case against the airline and the aviation regulator ruling that the alleged assaults took place off the plane and were not carried out by airline staff. He described the idea that airline staff could have intervened as “fanciful, trifling, implausible, improbable, and tenuous”.
The women appealed to the full federal court, comprising a panel of three judges, arguing the invasive searches occurred during the process of disembarkation and that the airline should therefore be held liable.
The full court agreed, ruling on Thursday that Justice Halley had erred in summarily dismissing the women’s claims.
“There is no sufficiently high degree of certainty that what happened to the appellants in the ambulance could not ultimately be found to have been in ‘the course of any of the operations of embarking or disembarking’. It is therefore not an issue apt to be decided at the stage of summary dismissal,” Justice Angus Stewart said.
“It is also an error to conclude at this stage of the proceeding that Matar’s duty of care cannot possibly extend to the circumstances in and around the ambulance.”
The court ordered Qatar Airways and Matar to pay the costs of the appeal.
At the time of the incident, the Qatari government defended its actions saying they were taken in response to the “shocking and appalling attempt to kill” a newborn girl who was found wrapped in plastic and discarded in a bin at the airport.
The measures were aimed at stopping the “perpetrators” from fleeing the country, the authorities said while offering an apology for any distress caused to passengers.
The total number of women subjected to the searches remains unclear. The Australian women were among 13 taken off Qatar Airways flight 908 alone.
Damian Sturzaker, the lawyer for the five women, said they were happy with the decision. “Our clients endured a traumatic experience on that night in Doha, and they deserve to have their day in court and compensation for their suffering,” he said, according to The Australian.
The women had brought claims of negligence, assault and false imprisonment against Matar and the aviation regulator. While Thursday’s ruling dismissed the case against the regulator, it allowed the women to amend and continue their case against Matar.
Mr Sturzaker said they would review the court’s reasoning to determine whether there was scope to appeal the decision regarding the regulator to Australia’s High Court.
The Independent has contacted Qatar Airlines and Matar for comment.
