A/HRC/10/14
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company employees, but it also recognizes that such reforms do not go far enough. States need
to employ sufficient numbers of contract managers who are trained in international human rights
and humanitarian law and ensure that there are sufficient monitors embedded with private
military and security companies in the field.
Oversight
65. As set out in its report to the General Assembly, the Working Group believes that
parliamentary oversight of private military and security companies could be established at the
level of the State and involve regular parliamentary hearings, inquiries, investigations, as well as
creating a specific committee, subcommittee or commission within the parliamentary structures
of countries exporting security and military services aimed at scrutinizing the delivery of
licences and monitoring and investigating actual activities of these companies.
66. The Working Group also believes that the international community should move away
from perceiving private military and security companies as part of regular exports under
commercial regulations and towards perceiving them as a highly specific field of exports and
services, requiring supervision and constant oversight by national Governments, civil society and
the international community led by the United Nations. Both Governments and the
United Nations system must take greater responsibility for what, where and how private military
and security companies are doing worldwide, and where and how they operate.
67. The Working Group also considers that an international oversight mechanism could be
established to receive complaints from all interested private military and security company
industry stakeholders regarding private military and security services and to conduct preliminary
investigations to help determine which complaints deserve further attention and which
authorities would be best suited to address them. While the Working Group currently carries out
some of these tasks, it has neither the resources nor the mandate to provide this oversight
mechanism as effectively as it ought to be done.
III. CONCLUSIONS
68. The Working Group expresses deep concern about the lack of regulation at the national
and international level of the activities of private military and security companies which recruit
and train thousands of citizens from all over the world, from developed and developing
countries, to perform tasks in Afghanistan, Iraq or in other zones of armed conflict, and in
post-conflict and low intensity conflict areas.
69. As the Working Group’s interaction with Governments in the course of country visits
shows, most Governments do not possess systematized information on which military and
security companies are registered in their territory, and which companies originating from their
country are registered abroad.
70. In conformity with the mandates of the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council
to elaborate guidelines and principles for the regulation of private military and security
companies, and ensuring the prevention of any violation by them of human rights norms, the
Working Group, after consultation with many national Governments in the course of regional
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