Palestine rights campaign calls for G4S to be barred from West Midlands Police services contract.
Supporters of Palestinian rights will be joining the lobby of West Midlands Police Authority on Thursday 12th July 2012 to protest against G4S, one of the companies bidding to run policing services due its support for Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine in breach of international law.
West Midlands Palestine Solidarity Campaign has written to Bishop Webley asking West Midlands Police Authority to remove G4S from its preferred list of bidders for the Business Partnering for Policing contract. Under the EU Procurement Regulations Public Authorities can exclude companies bidding for contracts where they have committed acts of grave professional misconduct including human rights violations.
In the West Midlands G4S is on a shortlist of 6 companies bidding for the privatisation of Policing services. The Business Partnering for Policing programme is a lucrative £1.5bn contract to privatise a wide range of policing services, including core police functions such as crime investigation and custody.
G4S, a joint British-Danish company, is one of the world’s largest international security corporations West Midlands PSC is concerned that G4S profits from the occupation of Palestine and is complicit in Israel’s violations of international law. The alleged case against G4S is as follows:
- G4S provides security equipment and services to incarceration facilities holding Palestinian political prisoners inside Israel and in the occupied West Bank.
- G4S provides security services to businesses in the illegal Jewish Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
- G4S provides equipment and maintenance services to Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank.
- G4S has provided security systems for the Israeli Police headquarters in the occupied West Bank.
Numerous UN resolutions and the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have confirmed that settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. G4S commercial activities make it complicit with Israel’s breach of the Geneva conventions which forbids an Occupying Power from deporting or transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
Palestinian organisations have recently called for G4S to be boycotted due to its involvement in servicing Israeli prisons which hold Palestinian political prisoners, many of them held without charge under administrative detention.
Naeem Malik, Chair of West Midlands PSC said: We are shocked that G4S, a company implicated in the deaths of asylum seekers held in its custody, including Jimmy Mubenga, and which actively supports Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine should be in the bidding to run Policing services in the West Midlands. Human rights should come first and the Police Authority has the power to exclude companies who have committed acts of grave professional misconduct, including human rights violations.