Last thursday 21st July, the United Nations’ Working Group on the use of Mercenaries organised a conference at the UN’s Headquarters in New York to discuss the process of privatization of war and the impact Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC) have on human rights, especially to the rights of peoples to self-determination.
Representatives from 17 States where present (U.S., CANADA, ECUADOR, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC, NEPAL, CHILE, POLAND, AUSTRIA, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, EUROPEAN UNION, BRAZIL, LIECHTENSTEIN, KAZAKHSTAN, ESTONIA, PHILIPPINES, AFGANISTAN, UKRAINE), as well as experts from Universities and organizations of the international civil society. NOVACT was one of these organizations, invited as an expert on the subject and panelist.
Jordi Palou-Loverdos, expert advisor for NOVACT, represented the organization analysing some of the most important aspects to consider: the accountability of PMSC’s activities and the remedies for the victims of human rights violations committed by these transnational companies. Likewise, we used this opportunity to present the last NOVACT’s research, “The Invisible Force”, a comparative analysis of the use and impact of PMSC in three different contexts: Colombia, Iraq and the Ocuppied Palestinian Territories.
The different interventions brought up key challenges for the phenomenon of privatization of war. First of all, the expansion of the PMSC’s industry. Expert Oladiran Bello, from the nigerian organisation Good Governance, asserted that today, there are 3.000 PMSC operating in his country. In this sense, legal expert of the organisation Center for Constitutional Rights, Katherin Gallagher, affirmed that during Obama’s Administration, private contractors have exceeded, by far, the military presence of the United States in a lot of contexts.
Secondly, the negative impact of PMSC on human rights. Bello explained that these Private military and Security Companies are hired by multinationals in Nigeria to control its natural resources, which represents a threat to the economic, social and cultural rights of the Nigerians, all of them essential aspects for the right of peoples to self-determination. Jordi Palou explained that, amongst the more than 100 cases of human rights violations analysed by NOVACT, several abuses were distinguished, related with tortures, indiscriminate shooting to civilians, complicity in contexts of occupation as the Palestinian, plunder of natural resources, transference of occupant’s population or land confiscations, among others.
The difficulties of monitoring the PMSC’s activities were also another of the important subjects to take into account. Some participants considered the difficulties of documenting cases of human rights violations committed by the PMSC. In this sense, NOVACT announced the approaching launch date of the Observatory on Private Security and Military Companies and Human Rights: Shock Monitor, and requested the support of the UN’s Working Group and the international community to be able to extend it to world-wide level.
The expert Gallagher, discussing about the big challenges for the litigation of human rights abuses committed by PMSC, mentioned that torture cases in Abu Ghraib showed the difficulties for jutging PMSC, even in contexts where the Geneva Conventions standards are stablished. Oladiran Bello also mentioned the architecture of impunity that puts corporate transnational rights over human rights.
Therefore, a lot of participants concluded that there are real big regulatory gaps on a national and international level to demand responsibility to companies, individuals and States by the crimes committed by PMSC. In spite of the evidences shown by the reports, the United States’ representatives present at the conference, ensured that legal effective and complementary mechanisms already exist, like the Document of Montreux and the Code of International Behaviour. The UN’s Working Group on the use of mercenaries’ representative, Gabor Rome, affirmed that the need to create an International Treaty to regulate this sector effectively, becomes more evident every day.
