The Holloway case goes civil

The case of the missing American teenager Natalee Holloway has entered a new phase.
After being unsuccessful in finding their daughter and bringing the people they hold responsible to criminal justice, her parents have filed a civil lawsuit.
The wrongful-death lawsuit (filed in Manhattan's state Supreme Court) seeks unspecified monetary damages.

The court papers present a partly speculative version of what happened after the young people left the casino and went to a bar called Carlos 'n' Charlies in the early hours of May 30, 2005.
The court papers claim that an intoxicated Holloway left at 1:30 am with Joran van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers.
Several of Holloway's friends saw her in the car with the youths and asked her to get out, which she didn’t.

The papers further claim that Joran:
a) willfully caused personal injury to Natalee as a result of his sexual assault upon he;
b) wrongfully, unlawfully and intentionally detained and directly restrained Natalee Holloway;
c) deprived her of her personal liberty through force and/or threat of force;
d) abducted Natalee Holloway and prevented her from returning to the custody of her parents.

As a result of this imagined sexual assault, the last hours of her life were marked “by torment, terror and debasement.”
The lawsuit includes Joran’s father since he supposedly breached his duty to Natalee by failing to take steps to prevent Joran from sexually assaulting Natalee Holloway.
According to the court papers, Paulus van der Sloot enabled his son’s violent and anti-social lifestyle since he supposedly went on the night of the disappearance with his underage son to a casino to play poker.
It was at that casino that the younger Van der Sloot met Holloway, again according to the filed lawsuit.

I find this lawsuit rather bizarre.
Suing Dutch citizens (who have never been indicted for a supposed crime that could have taken place in Aruba) in a New York court doesn't make a lot of sense.
I am convinced that the overworked courts of New York will throw the case out.
Moving the proceedings to Aruba would be logical, but unproductive as well.
Aruba is not an American territory and is ruled by the Dutch legal system.
In criminal cases, there is no plea bargaining, jury, etc.
There are also no huge settlements awarded in civil lawsuits.
Using a civil procedure to get a "conviction" (as was done in the O.J. Simpson case) is impossible under Dutch law.

What still puzzles me, is that Natalee's parents never sued her high school, although she went missing during her supervised senior class graduation trip of the Mountain Brook High School.

And as the Strategic Task Force (consisting of Aruban government and tourism authorities) correctly pointed out: "A civil case cannot compel the van der Sloots to return to New York to appear, nor is it clear that if the case is accepted, and a judgment imposed, that ... it will hold force in Aruba."