Missing the train. International governance gaps and the Jerusalem Light Railway

ABSTRACT

Since 2005, civil society activism appeared to be the most effective weapon against illegal economic activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Campaigns such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement provided a means to disrupt foreign investment, by targeting companies directly and invoking an idea of corporate responsibility for human rights abuses. However, European Union member states and the EU itself have failed to build on civic activism and have been slow to address the potential of the private sector to create new facts on the ground or use the concept of corporate responsibility as a framework for innovative policy approaches towards the occupation. Drawing on the example of the Jerusalem Light Railway (JLR), and the subsequent development of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), the paper examines the effectiveness of a discourse of corporate responsibility in addressing the continuing plight of Palestinian communities under occupation.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporate responsibility
• human rights
• civil society
• business and peace

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mary Martin is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Director of the UN Business and Human Security Initiative at LSE IDEAS, the LSE's foreign policy think-tank. Her research interests include the role of corporations in conflict prevention, private security in the international system, local ownership of peacebuilding and changing concepts of security. She is currently working with the private sector to contribute to implementation of the 2016 Colombian peace process, and to the post-conflict transition in Liberia.

Notes

1 The Swedish council said the 3.5 billion euros decision was based on commercial factors.

2 It also ran a bus service in the OPT.

3 Paris, 26 October 2005: Reply of the spokesman of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs retrieved from the website of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (www.diplomatie.gouv.fr) and quoted in Mendes-France, 2006; Mendes-France’s legal review of the court proceedings, highlights evidence that the French government had not disregarded Veolia and Alstom’s business in the West Bank, but on the contrary, that the companies’ involvement was part of a systematic policy of encouraging French contracts in Israel.

4 The idea of “responsibilisation” figures originally in criminology as an approach which places the governance of crimes in the hands of individuals, similarly it has been used in security discourse to involve particular actors beyond the state in efforts to resists threats, natural disasters and man-made catastrophes (see Garland, 2001).

5 Hewlett Packard, Caterpillar and Motorola have been among companies targeted through investors and lenders.

6 See Principle 7 (United Nations Humans Rights - Office of the High Commissioner, 2011, p. 9), The commentaries to Principles 12 and 21 refer to companies’ duty to also respect international humanitarian law.

7 See also Martin, 2012.

8 Due diligence arrangements are for example spelled out in Principles 17 and 19 of the UNGPs.

9 In 2014, Germany excluded the Occupied Territories from its support for Israeli tech companies and a bilateral scientific agreement with Israel (Pinaud, 2015, p. 36).

10 See for example: UN Report on database of business activities in settlements paragraph 41 (United Nations, 2018)

11 European states have however proved more active than most in developing NAPs, with slow takeup worldwide. 12 NAPs have been approved to date.

12 Subsidiaries of French transport groups SNCF and RATP alongside Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, a French public sector financial institution, and ALSTOM are involved in a second phase of the Jerusalem railway, which extends the existing line and creates two new lines, with settlements as endpoints (Association France Palestine Solidarité, 2018)

13 Sodastream faced consumer campaign by BDS, which was similar in its profile to Veolia. The company moved its operation from the OPT to southern Israel in 2014.