G4S profits from Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine. So why is the UN giving them $22 million?
Dear readers,
Waging violence is bad enough. Profiting from it? That’s even worse.
But that’s what G4S, a British “defense” conglomerate, does everyday. They run for-profit prisons and detention centers in occupied Palestine — and with over 1800 Palestinian men, women, and children arrested in the last 2 months, business is booming.
It doesn’t stop with prisons, though. G4S is cashing in from every part of Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestine — and you can find their blood-stained fingerprints on prisons the world over. At checkpoints along the apartheid wall, outposts that secure the siege of Gaza, and in immigration detention centers in the U.K. and U.S., where you can see the G4S logo on the wall.
At JVP, we’re standing with hundreds of other civil rights organizations, labor unions, faith groups, and activists, and demanding change. But there’s one holdout: the United Nations.
Despite overwhelming evidence of G4S complicity in human rights abuses, in Palestine and elsewhere, the U.N. has a $22 million contract with G4S.
Enough — it’s time for the UN to drop G4S. Go to the website of our coalition partner Adameer, the Palestinian prisoner rights organization, and send a letter to the Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to demand that the UN take action against G4S. [1]
In prisons and detention centers around the world, G4S has made money through persecution and punishment. Take Jimmy Mubenga, killed by G4S while being deported from London. Or Mangaung prison in South Africa, where G4S guards tortured inmates with electric shocks and forced drugging.
It’s clear that G4S commits grave human rights violations — in Israel and Palestine, in the U.S., and around the world. So why is the U.N. supporting G4S?
Add your name — tell U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to drop G4S. [1]
Don’t just take my word for it — take the U.N.’s. In 2012, a report by the U.N.’s own Special Rapporteur found G4S to be complicit in Israel’s violations of international law. And the U.N.’s supplier code of conduct states “the UN expects its suppliers to support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights and to ensure that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.”
The evidence is clear, and the moral case is clearer. G4S has blood on its hands. So long as it props up G4S, do too does the U.N.
Let’s change that.
Onwards,
Cecilie Surasky
Deputy Director, JVP
[1] This action is hosted by our coalition partner, Addameer, a Palestinian human rights organization. By signing the petition, you may receive email updates from Addameer in the future.
