Reports indicate Huawei will challenge its ban in the US courts

Huawei has been the subject of a lot of posts recently, following the company’s addition to a US department of Commerce list of regulated “entities”, and reports tonight from China indicate that the company is intending to challenge this in the courts.

According to a report on MyDrivers (Chinese), Huawei’s Chief Legal Officer, Song Liuping, gave the following statement to Chinese media this afternoon:

Huawei has filed a lawsuit and will file a summary judgment motion in Tuesday asking the court to declare the bill unconstitutional. The ban, a typical disenfranchisement bill that violates due process, directly finds Huawei guilty and imposes a number of restrictions on Huawei, with the obvious aim of driving Huawei out of the U.S. market.

(Appropriately, this translation was provided by the translation service running on a Huawei smartphone)

It’s not the first time (even this year) Huawei has signalled an intent to plead their case in a US court. The company has for some time been the subject of a ban on punishing services and equipment to the US government, and earlier this year had 13 criminal charges laid against it by the US Department of Justice. The company announced in March that it intends to sue the US government in response.

Conventional wisdom at the time said that Huawei’s legal arguments were likely to fall on deaf ears, but a court may be more sympathetic to the company now that the full extent of the damage done by the recent ban is coming to the fore.

It’s not really a surprise to hear that Huawei will fight the ban. With partners turning away from them in order to comply with the ban, the future of the company is at stake. This is a fight Huawei needs to win, and the odds seem stacked against it.

For further analysis of the situation and its possible ramifications across the entire technology industry, we recommend checking out this excellent post by tech commentator Owen Williams on Medium.