The British Government’s Green Paper on Private Military Companies (PMCs) provides a comprehensive overview of the PMC debate and outlines six regulatory options. Due to the range of activities carried out by PMCs, it is unlikely that one response alone would be adequate. This paper thus proposes a multidimensional approach to regulating British PMCs that matches the appropriate kind of response to the variety of activities that PMCs might undertake.
Regulation should aim to promote reputable PMC activities, and eliminate those that may have a negative impact on British national interests abroad. It should also make PMCs accountable for their activities as currently such companies typically operate in states with weak legal and judicial systems and are not covered in international law. Thus PMCs’ home governments should take responsibility for their activities.
The proposed multidimensional approach to regulating PMCs draws on UK obligations in international law and is associated with current systems in the USA and South Africa, arguably the only countries with comprehensive legislation on PMCs.
- The government should ban individuals from exercising the use of force in a foreign sovereign state where this would breach norms of non-interference and territorial integrity and aggravate conflict. This should apply to any individual that can not demonstrate a stake in the foreign conflict on the grounds of nationality. The government should also have extraterritorial powers to enforce such a ban.
- There should be a licensing regime that would require companies or individuals to obtain a licence for contracts for military and security services abroad. The government should outline what sort of activities PMCs may provide and should revoke the licence of any company found to have renege on these provisions.
- To get a license, PMCs should be required to introduce appropriate vetting procedures to prevent someone with a record of misconduct being employed. A publicly available register of PMCs should be created to provide public scrutiny of their activities.
- The government should both authorise companies to operate in the first place and outline criteria upon which prospective contracts will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. A General License scheme would not suffice as the circumstances in which military services are provided are as important as the services themselves.
- The government should have extraterritorial powers to enforce the licensing of military services. Client confidentiality should not be used as an excuse by PMCs for withholding adequate information about a prospective contract to the government.
- PMCs should be required to report on the contracts that they have fulfilled to a parliamentary committee. This would provide the government with the necessary information to include details of these contracts in its Annual Report on UK Strategic Exports.
- Those security services likely to fall outside the scope of the proposed licensing system because they are not directly concerned with the use of force should be regulated by industry-wide codes of conduct.
- An international regulatory regime for PMCs is still some way off. Although the UN could improve transparency of the PMC market, it is the responsibility of the member states to establish a regulatory system.
