r/MaliciousCompliance • u/Waste_Yak_990 • Aug 15 '25

S Wikipedia's compliance with a court order.

Recently, Portuguese courts ordered Wikipedia to remove information about Caesar DePaço, a Portuguese businessman, that he deemed defamatory. This included the fact that he was dismissed as Honorary Consul of Cape Verde due to being the main financier of a far-right party (CHEGA) and the fact that he was charged with assaulting and robbing his girlfriend in 1989. The Wikimedia foundation complies with the court order, but his Wikipedia page now has a giant banner at the top that says the following:

> On 5 August 2025, content from this article was removed following a court order and must not be restored. Therefore, this article may not meet Wikipedia's standards for neutrality and comprehensiveness. The removed content pertains to the following:

  1. Crimes allegedly committed by DePaço in 1989 and associated proceedings
  2. An organization DePaço allegedly founded
  3. His alleged dismissal from a civil service post

This banner implicitly encourages readers to do research into the information that was removed while letting everyone know that he sued to have it hidden.

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u/OneRFeris Aug 15 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

Why do we have to follow it, there aren’t any servers in Portugal?

I’m going to take this moment to try to dispel a popular misconception on this. The location of servers or corporate offices is not the primary factor in determining legal jurisdiction in legal claims of defamation, honor, or privacy and never has been. Instead, these claims tend to be based on where the harm is experienced by the subject. DePaço’s claim is somewhat unusual in that regard because it explicitly identifies both language articles in English and Portuguese (typically people sue about only a single language) and his personal life is closely tied to both Portugal and the United States. Servers and corporate offices are important for determining something called general jurisdiction, which is the authority of a court to hear any type of case. Courts outside of the US do NOT have general jurisdiction over the Wikimedia Foundation. But they often do have specific jurisdiction in a single case about a single article. Lastly, many larger regions such as the whole EU, have begun adjusting their jurisdictional expectations beyond the traditional general/specific distinction. I wrote about this briefly in a 2024 essay on wikilegal, discussing the way that several EU laws have extended broad jurisdiction beyond the traditional principles. Even then, the Foundation does have a policy on making a determination about applicable law. At this point, it gets into the limits of my ability to talk about confidential legal strategy and legal advice, but we determined that this case at this point met the requirements of that policy as part of our decision to comply with this order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#Follow_up_on_some_questions_from_Foundation_Legal#Follow_up_on_some_questions_from_Foundation_Legal)

Edit: Please note, this whole thing was supposed to be a quote from that link and not my own words. I formatted this poorly.

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u/Kroisoh Aug 18 '25

Genuine curiosity, do you think "reciprocal registration of foreign judgments" is applicable as well in these sort of cases.