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Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
by
Neve Gordon
Dissident Voice
September
4, 2003
In
her book Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns, Janice Thomson describes
how Sea Dogs such as Francis Drake extorted large ransoms from Spanish colonial
cities by threatening to destroy them if they failed to pay up. The Sea Dogs
were virtually indistinguishable from other pirates, except that they were
acting under the auspices of the crown. Queen Elizabeth orchestrated their
so-called private campaigns, and due in large part to these state-sanctioned
ravages, by the late 16th-century England had gained navel superiority over
Spain. In a sense, Francis Drake was a subcontractor; Queen Elizabeth
outsourced work, employing him and other Sea Dogs to execute certain tasks that
according to today’s parlance constituted blatant violations of human rights.
The
economic neologism outsourcing denotes, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, “the obtaining of goods or contracting of work from sources outside
a company or area.” Replacing the word work with violations and adding
the word government before company, imparts a definition which helps explain a
pervasive strategy used these days to abuse basic human rights: outsourcing,
the contracting of violations from sources outside a government, company, or
area.
Incorporating
the term outsourcing violations into everyday discourse is important not
because it describes a new practice, it doesn’t, but because it can be used as
a theoretical tool to facilitate the conceptualization of existing processes
pertaining to human rights. Using it to describe a range of existing practices
is helpful because outsourcing discloses and highlights some of the prevailing
features characterizing the global violation of human rights features that
might otherwise remain concealed.
Outsourcing
has been put to use primarily in order to abdicate social and moral
responsibility. Its benefits are legal, political, and economic.
From
a legal perspective, employing subcontractors is an effective device since it
obfuscates the connection between the perpetrator and the contravening act,
making it extremely difficult to hold the violator legally accountable for the
abuses it sanctions.
From
a political perspective, outsourcing is beneficial because even if abuses are
exposed, they are frequently presented to the public as having been carried out
by someone else, i.e. the subcontractor. In this manner, subcontracting
violations helps a country deflect the shaming technique considered by many the
most effective tool employed by human rights organizations. From a slightly
different perspective, insofar as a major role of rights groups is to create
norms that shape policies and interests as well as ensure that these norms are
respected, outsourcing is used in order to conceal the perpetrator’s breach of
these norms.
Finally,
the use of subcontractors is economically advantageous not only because it cuts
production costs, but also because it enables the corporation to avoid both
legal prosecution and embarrassment, both of which can have an unfavorable effect
on capital.
Hiring
subcontractors to avoid responsibility for violating economic and social rights
such as adequate working conditions and health care received extensive coverage
in the mid-1990s when grassroots organizations led a number of campaigns against
multinational corporations like Nike, Disney, Heineken, and Carlsberg.
Human
rights groups disclosed that Nike employed children in substandard working
conditions that endangered their health; they also revealed that Nike’s
Southeast Asian employees receive a salary of two dollars per day, which cannot
sustain them, let alone provide for health insurance and pension funds. When
first interviewed, Nike CEO and founder Philip Knight asserted that his company
wasn’t responsible for the violations because subcontractors were committing
them. It was later disclosed that Nike didn’t own any manufacturing companies;
all production was subcontracted to firms in countries like Thailand, Vietnam,
and Indonesia.
The
interesting phenomenon revealed by the Nike campaign isn’t so much the
exploitation of disadvantaged populations and resources a practice that can be
traced back to the colonizers of old but rather the widespread corporate
practice of outsourcing exploitation to subcontractors. Further, the
state-centric paradigm informing most human rights practitioners which assumes
that the state is the major violator of human rights is no longer accurate, as
it doesn’t take into account the inordinate influence of transnational
corporations whose revenues are often many times larger than domestic
economies.
Whereas
the employment of subcontractors sits well with neo-liberal economics, it often
undermines basic rights. It is common knowledge that the economic polarization
characterizing globalization has far-reaching implications for economic and
social rights, rights that are often violated by employing subcontractors.
Alongside
corporate outsourcing, governments violate rights by subcontracting services
such as prisons, healthcare, and the military, to corporations. These practices
are rarely confronted by human rights organizations in western countries,
partially as a result of Cold War politics and the western emphasis on free
market principles. Only in the past decade have scholars and human rights
organizations begun emphasizing the importance of economic and social rights,
demonstrating that without education and health, one cannot enjoy freedom of
speech or the right to associate. Moreover, economic rights are necessary for
measuring the detrimental effects of market forces including the harmful
implications of the widening social and economic gaps.
The
international campaigns against violations perpetrated in sweatshops across the
globe eventually led western companies to demand that their subcontractors meet
basic health and safety standards. Nonetheless, workers in sweatshops still
suffer widespread violations on a daily basis. Most governments and
transnational corporations as well as international financial institutions
continue to encourage the use of outsourcing to violate economic and social
rights.
Along
the same lines, political and civil violations are also subcontracted around
the globe. Torture, still illegal in the United States, has been contracted out
to countries like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Egypt. The CIA has already
transferred one hundred suspects to ally countries whose brutal torture methods
have been amply documented in the State Department's own annual human rights
reports. “We don't kick the [expletive] out of them,” one government official
told the Washington Post. “We send them to other countries so they can kick the
[expletive] out of them.”
This
is what The Nation’s Eyal Press found out:
Many captives have been sent to Egypt,
where, according to the State Department, suspects are routinely “stripped and
blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the
floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to
electric shocks.” In at least one case, a suspect was sent to Syria, where, the
State Department says, torture methods include “pulling out fingernails;
forcing objects into the rectum...using a chair that bends backwards to
asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine.” A story in Newsday published just
after Mohammed's arrest quoted a former CIA official who, describing a detainee
transferred from Guantánamo Bay to Egypt, said, “They promptly tore his
fingernails out and he started telling things.”
The
second Bush administration, with its ongoing attack on civil liberties, didn’t
invent the wheel. Not only have past administrations employed this tactic, but
other countries have as well.
Consider
Israel, which founded the mercenary South Lebanese Army (SLA) in 1978,
employing it to control the so-called security zone or enclave, comprising
about 10 percent of Lebanese territory. The Al-Khiam prison was the SLA’s
permanent interrogation and detention facility, in which prisoners were held
outside any legal framework. Torture was systematically practiced in Al-Khiam;
the methods employed included electric shock, suspension from an electricity
pole, dousing with water, painful postures, beating with an electric cable, and
sleep deprivation. Amnesty International reports that torture practiced by
Israel’s subcontractor resulted in physical injury and, on a number of
occasions, the death of detainees.
Military
training and support of governmental security forces and mercenaries, used
extensively by United States and the former Soviet Union after World War II,
are also mechanisms of outsourcing violations. Smaller and less powerful
nations used these tools as well. The brutal Buhtulaizi government was armed
and supported by the South African apartheid regime, and the paramilitaries in
East Timor operated under the directives of the Indonesian military.
More
recently, Private Military Contractors (PMCs), frequently run by retired
military generals, have been utilized to do the dirty work previously carried
out by foreign mercenaries. PMCs are the new big business on the block. Their
job is to provide stand-ins for active soldiers, engaging in everything from
actual fighting and battlefield training to logistical support and military
advice at home and abroad. Writing for Mother Jones, Barry Yeoman suggests that
they enjoy an estimated $100 billion in business each year, with much of this
money going to Fortune 500 firms like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Halliburton
and DynCorp. In the recent U.S. war on Iraq, the United States employed an estimated
twenty thousand corporate workers in the region; that is one civilian for every
ten soldiersa tenfold increase over the 1991 Iraqi War.
The
advantage of subcontracting to PMCs is clear: it allows the executive branch to
avoid public debate or legislative controls.
While
Congress capped the number of U.S. soldiers who could be sent to Colombia at
five hundred, the Pentagon together with the Colombian government have been
employing additional corporate soldiers from DynCorp to carry out anti-drug operations.
According to Peter Singer from the Brookings Institute, the firm utilizes armed
reconnaissance planes and helicopter gunships designed for counterguerrilla
warfare, and has been involved in several firefights with local rebels. DynCorp
has lost several planes and employees to rebel fire, but there has been no
public outcry about the losses, simply because “corporate soldiers” were killed
rather than “real soldiers.”
In
Bosnia, the addition of two thousand corporate soldiers helped evade the Congressional
limit of twenty thousand troops. The issue isn’t only that the Pentagon uses
PMCs to undercut restrictions made via democratic procedures, but also that
corporate soldiers are accountable solely to the corporations that retain them,
rather than to governments.
Employees
of DynCorp in Bosnia were caught operating a sex-slave ring of underage women
and even videotaping a rape. Leslie Wayne from the New York Times reported that
while DynCorp employees trafficked in womenincluding buying one for $1,000the
company turned a blind eye. Since the DynCorp employees involved weren’t
soldiers, their actions weren’t subject to military discipline. Nor did they
face local justice; they were simply fired and sent home.
A
1991 U.S.-approved United Nations arms embargo prohibited the sale of weapons
to or training of any warring party in the Balkans. But the Pentagon referred
Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), another private military
contractor (currently a subsidiary of L-3 Communications) to Croatia's defense
minister. MPRI trained local forces in Croatia, which used their education to
drive more than one hundred thousand Serbs from their homes and kill hundreds
in a four-day ethnic cleansing campaign. No employee of the military firm has
ever been charged.
An
additional example wherein outsourcing is used to systematically violate human
rights is the private prison complex, which currently holds over one hundred
thousand inmates. In this case both political and civil rights, as well as
economic and social rights, are violated.
The
Nation’s Eric Bates argues that the real danger of prison privatization isn’t
merely the inhumanity on the part of guards, but rather the added financial
incentives that reward inhumanity. He states, “The same economic logic that
motivates companies to run prisons more efficiently also encourages them to cut
corners at the expense of workers, prisoners and the public. Private prisons
essentially mirror the cost-cutting practices of health maintenance
organizations: Companies receive a guaranteed fee for each prisoner, regardless
of the actual cost. Every dime they don’t spend on food or medical care or
training for guards is a dime they can pocket.”
The
major cut is in personnel. Employees are insufficiently trained, underpaid, and
reduced in number; this results in, among other things, excessive violence by
both guards and prisoners. Using an extensive apparatus of video cameras, one
prison employs only five guards to supervise 750 prisoners during the day, and
two at night. With rapid employee turnover and lack of guard training comes a
significantly higher rate of contraband, drugs, and assaults on staff and
prisoners.
Health
services, when provided, are often inadequate and arrive too late, according to
Allison Campbell, coeditor of Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization
and Human Rights. Rehabilitative or educational programs are seen as
superfluous luxuries that prisoners don’t deserve and that businesses cannot
afford. Finally, lack of adequate food is also a major issue in private
prisons. One released inmate reported that he would receive one good meal a
month; the rest consisted of instant potatoes, canned vegetables, and pizzas.
“When
the prison is a business, such cost reductions make a certain kind of sense,”
Campbell claims. “However, physical abuse, inadequate health care and a lack of
adequate programming too often amounts to gross abuse of state-sanctioned power
and authority.”
Outsourcing
is, however, not merely employed as a strategy to help the perpetrator abdicate
responsibility for the violations it authorizes. It also assists the aggressor
in maintaining a respectable aura in the public’s eye. It isn’t the United
States that tortures Al-Qaeda suspects, Egypt does; it isn’t the transnational corporation
that neglects the health of its employees, but rather its subsidiary in
Thailand.
The
state and transnational corporations use subcontractors in order to conceal
pernicious practices, because the success of those in power, as Michel Foucault
convincingly argued, “is in proportion to its ability to hide its own
mechanisms.” Thus, outsourcing should be considered a technique employed by
power in order to conceal its own mechanisms. It is motivated by governments
and corporations’ unwavering efforts to remain in control.
Because
power is tolerable only insofar as it manages to mask part of itself, it
presents hierarchical, exploitative, and oppressive relationships as if they
are normal or natural; that is, beyond politics. Put differently, states and
corporations employ a range of strategies and techniques in order to display
social relationships that are upheld by power as if they were devoid of it or
in some way deterministic. Accordingly, the outsourcing technique itself is
frequently presented as necessary, as is evident in many economic discourses
that argue that corporations must cut production costs if they are to survive;
outsourcing therefore becomes inevitable. Along the same lines, cuts in
government expenditure on health and education, as well as outsourcing work
through personnel agencies and privatizing public services and companies, are
presented as necessary and beyond politics. The idea that the outsourcing
technique is necessarily driven by the configuration of the global economy is
also an assertion of power.
The
practice of outsourcing violations engenders new challenges for the human
rights community. If the party carrying out the act isn’t the only culpable
entity, then the process of identifying those responsible becomes much more
complicated. Moreover, identifying the agent employing the subcontractor is
only the first step in a long and arduous struggle against violations, since it
often remains extremely difficult to prosecute or effectively employ the
shaming technique. Consequently, human rights organizations need to develop new
strategies and promote the introduction of clear directives within
international law that take into account this phenomenon and can aid in holding
governments, corporations, and other international financial institutions
accountable. Some international agreements and treaties already have been
providing a legal framework from which to begin addressing these violations.
The
Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights is
one example, declaring, for instance, that: states are responsible to ensure
that private entities or individuals, including transnational corporations over
which they exercise jurisdiction, do not deprive individuals of their economic,
social and cultural rights. States are responsible for violations of economic,
social and cultural rights that result from their failure to exercise due
diligence in controlling the behavior of such non-state actors (article 8).
Confronting
the outsourcing of social and economic violations requires a major reassessment
of how human rights organizations should be constituted. Rights organizations
need to begin presenting an alternative to the neo-liberal discourse
disseminated by governments, corporations, and the mass media. The current
hegemonic discourse ignores the existence of economic and social rights and
assumes that businesses must be given maximum leeway to operate. In order to
accomplish this, rights groups must also rethink the make-up of their
organizations and begin hiring social economists who can work with their legal
advisors. The underlying assumption informing this suggestion is that the
objective of human rights organizations isn’t only to struggle against specific
violations, but also to create a space and a discourse that empowers oppressed
populations and enables them to struggle for their basic rights. Thus, the very
introduction of alternative discourses and terms will assist in the struggle
against human rights violations in the broadest sense.
Neve Gordon teaches politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University, Israel,
and has written about the outsourcing technique within the Israeli context for
the Journal of Human Rights. He can be reached at ngordon@bgumail.bgu.ac.il
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