16. Jun 2014
The security company G4S terminates its contracts with the Israeli prison services over a 3 year period. This decision is made in the wake of a DanWatch report from 2010 which discloses the company's contracts with Israeli prisons.
Torture and the imprisonment of children and political prisoners. Until last week, the Danish-British security company G4S supplied technology and thus contributed, according to Amnesty International, among others, to systematic human rights violations in the Israeli security services. However, that ends now.
At the annual general meeting at G4S last week, the company announced that it will not be renewing its contracts with the Israeli prison services when they expire over the course of the next three years.
In 2010, DanWatch revealed that G4S had contracts with the Israeli occupying force in terms of supply of guard services and technology to checkpoints and the wall between the West Bank and Israel, which was deemed to be contrary to international law back in 2004. The contracts also obligate G4S to supply security technology to Israeli prisons in the West Bank and in Israel, where human rights organizations have documented the use of torture, the imprisonment of miners and the systematic imprisonment of political prisoners.
Over the past few years, hunger strikes and serious human rights violations inside the prisons have sparked international attention to contracts between G4S and the Israeli security services. G4S has not had personel stationed in the prisons on a daily basis, instead it supplies and services infrastructure.
In May of last year, G4S terminated its supply of security and surveillance equipment to the Israeli Ofer prison in the West Bank, the Israeli ‘E1’ police station in the West Bank as well as checkpoints along the wall that separates the West Bank from Jerusalem and Israel.
The remaining G4s contracts, which have been active so far, will now be phased out over the course of the next three years.
What remains are the company’s contracts with private businesses that stand for civil infrastructure in the settlements, such as banks and supermarkets. According to the 4 th Geneva Convention, it is illegal for an occupying force to move an occupied population to the territory of the occupying force; an international law that Israel violates through the imprisonment of Palestinians in Israel.