Qatar Airways avoids lawsuit over treatment of Australian women at Doha airport

Qatar Airways has successfully dodged an Australian lawsuit over an incident at Doha airport in which women were forcibly removed from planes by armed guards and some intimately examined.

The five women initiated legal action against the airline in 2022, later adding the QCAA and Matar to the case over the October 2020 incident, seeking damages over alleged “unlawful physical contact”, false imprisonment and mental health impacts, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

They were among more than a dozen passengers who were escorted off the Sydney-bound Qatar Airways plane by armed guards as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag at Hamad international airport.

In a judgment on the various interlocutory applications handed down in Sydney on Wednesday, Halley agreed that the QCAA was immune from the court’s jurisdiction, and found that Qatar Airways should not have to go to trial for the case because its employees could not have influenced the actions of the Qatari police.

“The proposition that Qatar Airways was able to exert any relevant control over the officers of the MOI conducting the police operation or the nurse in the ambulance can fairly be characterised as ‘fanciful, trifling, implausible, improbable, tenuous or one that is contradicted by all the available documents or other materials’,” the judgment said.

The action was launched in an Australian court because both Australia and Qatar are parties signed up to the Montreal convention, which governs airline liability around the world.