If Barack Obama can publicly apologize for the accidental killings of two al-Qaida hostages – one American and one Italian – by a US drone strike, the White House should extend the same courtesy to a pair of Yemeni civilians killed by US Hellfire missiles.

That is the hope of the wrongful death lawsuit filed late on Sunday by the families of Salem bin Ali Jaber and Waleed bin Ali Jaber, two men killed by a US drone strike in August 2012 in the eastern Yemeni village of Khashamir. And although it’s unclear if the case will even be heard, human rights groups who have long criticized the use of armed and unmanned aircrafts for counterterrorism operations believe the families of the two victims were left with no other option but to sue.

“In terms of exhaustion of remedies, we’ve tried everything,” Alka Pradhan, a counter-terrorism counsel for Reprieve US who has represented the families, told the Guardian in a phone interview.

Pradhan added that Obama’s apology in April over the deaths of American development expert Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto, two hostages being held by al-Qaida at a compound in Pakistan, showed a double standard for how western lives are treated as opposed to civilians in countries ravaged by the broader “war on terror”.

“We saw the president get up on a podium at the White House and give a statement talking about the horrible mistake that had been made by the US, and the lengths to which the US government was going to go to make that mistake right for the families,” said Pradhan, pointing out that in nearly three years there had been no such remorse shown over the killings of Salem and Waleed. The families “have basically been begging for an acknowledgment of exactly that kind. The message of over two years is that their lives – the lives of Yemeni citizens – don’t matter as much as those of western lives”.

A spokesman for the US national security council did not immediately return a request for comment.

Obama’s recognition in April of the hostage killings was an unprecedented admission for the US government, which typically keeps information surrounding its drone policy shrouded in secrecy. While the Obama administration has long insisted that the lethal use of drones occurs with as much precision and intelligence available, the revelations were a rare moment in which the White House conceded the CIA does not always know whom it specifically seeks to kill.

The president, who has faced criticism for the trail of civilian deaths left by record drone strikes under his watch, expressed his “profound regret” over Weinstein’s and Lo Porto’s deaths, called for an investigation of what went wrong, and announced compensation for the hostages’ families.

Relatives of Salem and Waleed received $155,000 in compensation from the Yemeni government last year, which human rights groups like Reprieve have said came from the US government. But the families, who are not seeking financial compensation in their 43-page lawsuit, said they want only to clear the names of two men whom civil liberties advocates have dubbed “model citizens” – Salem was a cleric who preached against al-Qaida, Waleed a police officer.

Both men were inadvertently killed amid a meeting with three youths, who had requested a meeting with Salem near a local mosque. Drone operators said they had evidence that the three youths were members of al-Qaida, leading them to assume the same of Salem and Waleed at the time of the strike, according to the New York Times.

US courts have a mixed record with respect to drones. Last year, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over a drone strike in Yemen in 2011 that killed three US citizens, including the teenage son of former al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki. An appeals court nonetheless released a redacted version of a long-secret Department of Justice memo that lays out the legal rationale for targeting American citizens overseas.

Legal experts declined to speculate on whether the case of Salem and Waled would be heard.

But Pardiss Kebriaei, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the lawsuit is significant because it “puts a face on some of the hundreds of Yemenis killed by US drones”.

“It gives further lie to the claim that they’re all ‘militants’ killed in precision strikes. It raises basic questions we need to keep asking about the legality and efficacy of these strikes,” Kebriaei said, adding that the “knee-jerk reaction” of the US government has been to frame any legal challenge over its torture, detention and counterterrorism practices within the context of its “war on terror”.

The goal has been “to prevent claimants from being heard at all, and the lower courts have largely deferred, but that’s not a track record to be proud of. The government isn’t defending its conduct on the merits and winning. It’s simply slamming the door in victims’ faces”.

Letta Tayler, a senior researcher on terrorism and counter-terrorism at Human Rights Watch, said regardless of whether the strike was lawful or unlawful, it “clearly was counterproductive, and the US silence compounds the backlash”.

“This case serves as an important reminder that the Obama administration can’t keep hiding its head in the sand and only acknowledge accidental deaths of westerners in its secret drones program, as if the Yemeni and Pakistani civilians it kills in such strikes simply did not exist,” said Tayler in an email. “President Obama should immediately grant their request, apologize, and publish the findings of US investigations into this strike, and he should offer compensation as well.”

“It’s shocking that family members would have to take a request as basic as an acknowledgement of death of loved ones to a court almost halfway around the world, simply because they are not American.”

In April, a collaborative report from the Open Society Justice Initiative and researchers from the Yemeni nongovernmental organization Mwatana Organization for Human Rights documented nine US air strikes between May 2012 and April 2014 that caused civilian harm.

While the US government has said reports of civilian casualties are inflated by outside groups, the report cited several drone strikes that killed innocent civilians based on interviews with victims and their relatives, eyewitnesses, doctors and hospital staff. Among them were a US drone strike that killed 12 people, including a pregnant woman and three children, as well as another strike on a house that contained 19 people, including women and children.