Days of Palestine, Vancouver -Tens of Canadians took to the streets on Thursday, calling for Canadian security agency to drop contract with notorious British security firm G4S.
Several groups of activists, including the Canada Palestine Association, Independent Jewish Voices, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Solidarity Network and International League of Peoples Struggle participated in the protest, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.
The protestors called for the Canadian Air Transportation Security Authority (CATSA) to drop its contract with the British security company and occupation profiteer G4S.
G4S supplies security forces and interrogators for all Israeli prisons, jails, illegal military checkpoints and along the Apartheid Wall throughout the Israeli occupation.
In addition, the notorious British firm supplies security services for many international airports and refugee detainment centres, including Canada.
In 2011 the Canadian Air Transportation Security Authority CATSA, the crown corporation responsible for security at Canadian airports, awarded G4S Canada a contract worth up to $416 million for security at airports in the Pacific Region (which includes BC and the Yukon). The contract covers 20 airports including YVR until March 31, 2017.
G4S in Israeli prisons
Because of contracts with the Israeli occupation, which make it complicit with the maintenance of the repressive infrastructure of the occupation and apartheid state, G4S is the target of an international campaign for boycott and divestment.
G4S provides security systems for the Ketziot and Megiddo prisons, which hold Palestinian political prisoners from occupied Palestinian territories inside the Israeli occupation. Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the transfer of prisoners from an occupied territory into the territory of the occupier.
G4S also provides equipment for Ofer prison, located in the occupied West Bank, and for Kishon and Moskobiyyeh detention facilities, where human rights organisations have documented systematic torture and ill treatment of Palestinian prisoners, including children.
Defence for Children-Palestine (DCI-Palestine) has released an urgent appeal to end the practice of holding Palestinian children from the West Bank in solitary confinement in Israeli facilities.
Military Checkpoints
Beyond Israeli prison system, G4S provides equipment and services to Israeli checkpoints in the occupied West Bank along the route of illegal Israeli Apartheid Wall and to the terminals isolating the occupied and besieged territory of Gaza.
G4S also contracts for equipment and services for the West Bank Israeli Police headquarters and to private businesses based in the illegal Israeli settlements.
A panel of legal experts has concluded that G4S may be criminally liable for its activities in support of illegal Israeli Wall and other violations of international law.
Internationally, G4S has been implicated in human rights violations against Indigenous people and poor rural communities, particularly in the Global South where it provides security to international mining and oil and gas companies.
In recent years, numerous institutions and governments have heeded the call for boycott and divestment from G4S including the Bill Gates Foundation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the US United Methodist Church and the municipality of Durham County in North Carolina.
With numerous other security options available, it’s time for CATSA to side with human rights and a just and lasting peace and cancel their contract with G4S.
International pressure such as these protests and demonstrations are critical to bringing an end to occupation tyranny and in holding organisations like G4S to account for the part in breaking international laws, war crimes, crimes against children and crimes against humanity in Palestine.
Spokesman of Canada Palestine Association, Palestinian, Khalil Mansour highlighted that these actions of solidarity “give hope to the ones back home, and help them sustain their resistance to occupation.”
The entire G4S business model is fundamentally structured to protect the interests of governments and organisations that hire them and this is a clear matter of the rich and the powerful against the poor and oppressed in Palestine and around the world.
G4S has blood on their hands from their active participation and work for the Zionist Occupation Regime in Palestine.
Ema Mei & BDS Vancouver 2016
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