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
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