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 most of the alleged wrongdoing took place abroad.
