Alan Gross with his wife Judy. Photo: Gross family.

JNS.org – A lawsuit filed against the U.S. government in 2012 by Jewish-American contractor Alan Gross, who has been imprisoned in Cuba since 2009, was dismissed by a federal judge.

Gross, serving a 15-year prison term for helping Cuba’s Jewish community access the Internet while he was a subcontractor for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), was working to promote democracy, but Cuba convicted him of “crimes against the state.”

The lawsuit against the U.S. said that Gross had not been prepared for the risks he later encountered while doing his job in Cuba, the Associated Press reported. But in his opinion, Judge James Boasberg wrote that federal law does not allow the government to be sued based on injuries that occurred outside of the U.S.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in January stated that Cuba’s detention of Gross is arbitrary and called for his immediate release.