The Legal Regime Applicable To Private Military And Security Company Personnel In Armed Conflicts

This book investigates the modern privatisation of war. It specifically focuses on the legal regime regulating private military and security company (PMSC) personnel in armed conflicts. The law regulating PMSC personnel is analysed from two perspectives. Firstly, can one of the three following legal statuses established by international humanitarian law – “mercenary”, “combatant” or “civilian” – be applied to PMSC personnel? Secondly, the book employs a context-dependent methodology to explore the legal regime regulating PMSC personnel. It argues that the legal regime regulating PMSC personnel in armed conflicts depends on who hires them: individual states, the United Nations, non-governmental organisations, or armed groups. This approach represents a departure from previous literature, where attention has primarily been paid to the use of PMSCs by states.

This book’s primary concern is the application of International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law in addressing the business conduct of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) during armed conflicts, as well as state responsibility for human rights violations and current attempts at international regulation. The book discusses four interconnected themes. First, it differentiates private contractors from mercenaries, presenting an historical overview of private violence. Second, it situates PMSCs’ employees under the legal status of civilian or combatant in accordance with the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949. It then investigates the existing law on state responsibility and what sort of responsibility companies and their employees can face. Finally, the book explores current developments on regulation within the industry, on national, regional and international levels. These themes are connected by the argument that, in order to find gaps in the existing laws, it is necessary to establish what they are, what law is applicable and what further developments are needed.

The conduct of armed conflict is increasingly being outsourced to private military and security companies, whose legal position remains unclear. This book identifies and analyses the human rights and humanitarian law framework applicable to these companies, examining how they can be held to account and how victims can obtain remedies.

This book explores the human rights consequences of the new mercenarism, as channeled through so-called private military and security companies (PMSCs), and offers an overview of the evolution and status quo of both non-legal (soft law and self-regulation) and legal initiatives seeking to limit them. It addresses various topics, including the impact of the presence of non-state actors on human security using the cases of Afghanistan and Syria; research on PMSCs’ impact on human rights in specific cases; the insufficiency and ineffectiveness of existing direct and indirect legal prohibitions on the use of mercenaries; various aspects of international human rights law and international humanitarian law related to the conduct of PMSCs; soft-law and self-regulation mechanisms; and the international minimum standard in general international law regarding the privatization, export, import, and contracting of PMSCs.

A comprehensive and detailed analysis of the international legal framework applying to private military and security companies in armed conflict.

Frequently characterized as either mercenaries in modern guise or the market's response to a security vaccuum, private military companies are commercial firms offering military services ranging from combat and military training and advice to logistical support, and which play an increasingly important role in armed conflicts, UN peace operations, and providing security in unstable states. This work analyzes the current legal framework and the needs and possibilities for regulation in the years ahead, organized around four sets of questions, which are reflected in the four parts of the book. First, why and how is regulation of PMCs now a challenging issue? Secondly, how have problems leading to a call for regulation manifested in different regions and contexts? Third, what regulatory norms and institutions currently exist and how effective are they? And, fourth, what role has the market to play in regulation?

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in armed conflicts around the world, with PMSCs participating in, for example, offensive combat, prisoner interrogation and the provision of advice and training. The extensive outsourcing of military and security activities has challenged conventional conceptions of the state as the primary holder of coercive power and raised concerns about the reduction in state control over the use of violence. Hannah Tonkin critically analyses the international obligations on three key states - the hiring state, the home state and the host state of a PMSC - and identifies the circumstances in which PMSC misconduct may give rise to state responsibility. This analysis will facilitate the assessment of state responsibility in cases of PMSC misconduct and set standards to guide states in developing their domestic laws and policies on private security.

Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have constituted a perennial feature of the security landscape. Yet, it is their involvement in and conduct during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have transformed the outsourcing of security services into such a pressing public policy and world-order issue. The PMSCs’ ubiquitous presence in armed conflict situations, as well as in post-conflict reconstruction, their diverse list of clients (governments in the developed and developing world, non-state armed groups, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, and international corporations) and, in the context of armed conflict situations, involvement in instances of gross misconduct, have raised serious accountability issues. The prominence of PMSCs in conflict zones has generated critical questions concerning the very concept of security and the role of private force, a rethinking of "essential governmental functions," a rearticulation of the distinction between public/private and global/local in the context of the creation of new forms of "security governance," and a consideration of the relevance, as well as limitations, of existing regulatory frameworks that include domestic and international law (in particular international human rights law and international humanitarian law). This book critically examines the growing role of PMSCs in conflict and post-conflict situations, as part of a broader trend towards the outsourcing of security functions. Particular emphasis is placed on key moral, legal, and political considerations involved in the privatization of such functions, on the impact of outsourcing on security governance, and on the main challenges confronting efforts to hold PMSCs accountable through a combination of formal and informal, domestic as well as international, regulatory mechanisms and processes. It will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, practitioners and advocates for a more transparent and humane security order. This book was published as a special issue of Criminal Justice Ethics.