The Federal Court has determined three women who launched legal action against Qatar Airways after they were invasively searched cannot sue because of the rules that govern international air travel.

On Wednesday Federal Court Justice John Halley found Qatar’s Civil Aviation Authority were immune from foreign prosecution. He found the women could not bring a claim against Qatar Airways under the Montreal Convention, saying the proposition was “fanciful, trifling, implausible, improbable, tenuous or one that is contradicted by all the available documents or other materials”.

The Montreal Convention is a multilateral treaty used to establish airline liability in the event of death or injury to passengers.

The women, who are represented by Marque Lawyers, were granted leave to re-plead their claim against a third party – the Qatar government’s airport company, MATAR. This leave to re-plead is limited to claims pertaining to the alleged conduct of the airport employees. The women will also be able to re-plead that MATAR owed a duty of care to prevent the nurses, who are not MATAR employees, from conducting the searches.

The women sought damages against the airline and the Qatari government over an incident in 2020 when they were removed from a plane and strip-searched without their consent to determine if they had recently given birth, after a baby was found in a bathroom at Hamad International Airport.

“Were [the relevant] applicants able to bring a claim against Qatar Airways under the Montreal Convention? I’ve concluded that the answer to that question must be no,” Halley said on Wednesday.

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The strip-search incident resurfaced outside the courts last year when Transport Minister Catherine King moved to reject Qatar Airways’ application to double its flights to Australia. The women had written to the minister asking that Qatar’s application be refused, and King responded to say the government was no longer considering the application.

The decision to reject Qatar Airways caused outcry from most the aviation industry due to the economic consequences, and ultimately led to a parliamentary inquiry late last year that focused on the relationship between the government and Australia’s biggest airline, Qantas, a rival of Qatar and its partner Virgin Australia.