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The New York Times/ - Politics, Dom, 01 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
Can Privatization Kill?
ON Oct. 12, 2010, Jimmy Mubenga was deported from
Britain. The 46-year-old Angolan had come to the
country as a refugee 16 years earlier. But after his
involvement in a pub brawl and a subsequent criminal
conviction, the government ordered his deportation.
Three private security guards escorted him through
Heathrow Airport and onto British Airways Flight 77 to
Luanda, Angola. The exact details of what followed are
still unclear and currently subject to criminal
investigation.
Several passengers onboard the plane reported that
Mr. Mubenga repeatedly complained that he could not
breathe and that he was being held down with his
head between his knees by security guards. As the
airplane taxied to the runway in London, Mr. Mubenga
lost consciousness and later died.
Immigration control has traditionally been viewed as an
inalienable sovereign function of the state. But today
migration management has increasingly been taken
over by private contractors. Proponents of privatization
have been keen to argue that the use of contractors
does not mean that governments lose control. Yet,
privatization introduces a corporate veil that blurs both
public oversight and legal accountability.
Despite efforts to introduce outside supervisors,
performance reports and other monitoring
mechanisms, the private nature of these companies
breaks the ordinary administrative chain of command,
placing both governments and the public at a
disadvantage in terms of ensuring transparency.
Private companies seldom have an interest in securing
public oversight, as any criticism may entail negative
economic consequences. Australasian Correctional
Management, which ran detention centers in Australia
from 1998 to 2004, was known to require medical staff
members or teachers entering its facilities to sign
confidentiality agreements preventing them from
disclosing any information regarding detainees or the
administration of the centers. Being foreigners,
migrants and refugees have always had a hard time
gaining access to outside complaint mechanisms and
advocacy institutions. As an employee in charge of
reviewing disciplinary cases at a Corrections
Corporation of America facility in Houston once told a
reporter from this paper, “I’m the Supreme Court.”
The corporate veil also distorts lines of legal
responsibility. Human rights law is largely designed on
the presumption that it is states and not private
companies that exercise sovereign powers like
detention or border control. Legally holding
governments accountable for human rights violations
by contractors requires an additional step showing that
it is the state and not just the corporation or individual
employee that is responsible for the misconduct.
Mr. Mubenga’s case is not unique. Numerous reports
have been filed about misconduct, violence and abuse
perpetrated by contractors carrying out migration
functions. The three security guards responsible for
deporting Mr. Mubenga worked for the Anglo-Danish
security company G4S. Before Mr. Mubenga’s death,
G4S held the exclusive contract with the U.K. Border
Agency to provide escorts for immigration detainees
deported from the country. The firm subsequently lost
this contract, but this didn’t end its involvement in
managing migration.
As the world’s largest security company with more than
650,000 employees, G4S is involved in a plethora of
migration functions all over the world, from operating
immigration detention centers in Britain to carrying out
passenger screening at airports in Europe, Canada
and the Middle East. In America, G4S operates a fleet
of custom-built fortified buses that serve as deportation
transports for illegal migrants caught along the United
States-Mexico border. Just last month, the U.K. Border
Agency signed a new contract with G4S worth up to
$337 million to house asylum seekers.
G4S’s success in this market shows that deportation,
detention and border control have become big
business. Boeing’s current contract to set up and
operate a high-tech border surveillance system along
the United States-Mexico border is worth $1.3 billion
and involves nearly 100 subcontractors. The
Florida-based Geo Group — one of G4S’s main
competitors — manages 7,000 detention beds in the
United States and, until recently, at the Guantánamo
Bay detention center, where migrants intercepted in
the Caribbean are transferred. N.G.O.s and
international organizations profit, too. In 2010, the
International Organization for Migration was paid $265
million to assist governments in returning migrants to
their home countries, among other activities.
The migration control industry covers not only
detention and deportations but also border control.
Many airlines today employ former immigration officers
or themselves contract security companies to perform
the document, forgery and profiling checks required by
destination states. In Israel, the West Bank
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