Most suspected it would happen eventually, but probably not in this form. In what the plaintiffs’ lawyers are calling both conceptual art project and ‘the mother of all lawsuits’, an action has been filed to determine whether American and Thai authorities and a French hotelier acted negligently in preparing for and dealing with last year’s tsunami disaster.

I’m not sure just how seriously a frivolous negligence lawsuit like this ought to be taken — let alone an action that has its own website (and let alone a website whose domain name seems designed to reap Google advertising revenue rather than actually publicise the action). With this in mind:

Nineteen German and Austrian tourists are filing a lawsuit against the government of Thailand and the French hotel chain Accor over the Indian Ocean tsunami… Another defendant is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; plaintiffs complain that NOAA’s Pacific Tsunami Warning System failed to issue a warning for a tsunami in a completely different ocean. (Aside from the fact that NOAA owes no duty to vacationing Germans in Thailand, NOAA did try to notify other countries of the tsunami potential of the earthquake.)

The action is clearly without legal merit. Further, if the lawyers representing the plaintiffs are as articulate as this AFX News piece suggsts, they aren’t going to get very far:

‘We found that serious lapses [sic] were committed,’ said Herwig Hasslacher, one of the three lawyers for the group. They said the suit was not, at present, designed to demand compensation but to uncover evidence that would prove negligence.

The suits are likely to be dismissed quickly. According to the article, though, this isn’t the first time Fagan (senior counsel for the plaintiffs) has proceeded with such costly (and legally frivolous) publicity stunts: he previously brought an action on behalf of holocaust survivors. Whilst many will no doubt take offence, such lawsuits are invariably amusing (at least for those who don’t have to preside over them).