Guest Blogger: Laura Dickinson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Laura Dickinson (left) as today's guest blogger.
Laura is the Foundation Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.
She joined the ASU law faculty in 2008, having taught previously at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She was a Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University in 2006-2007.
An expert on human rights, national security, foreign affairs privatization, and qualitative empirical approaches to international law, Laura is the author of Outsourcing War and Peace (2011). This just-published book examines the privatization of military, security, and foreign aid functions of government and its impact on core public values.
During the Clinton Administration, Laura served as a senior policy adviser to Harold Hongju Koh when he was Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Before that, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer and for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. A term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and and co-organizer of a Collaborative Research Network on Empirical Approaches to International Human Rights Law, convened under the auspices of the Law & Society Association, Laura is also a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. Her guest post below sets forth the call for papers for an ASIL initiative, the Research Forum for which she serves as a 2011 co-chair.
Heartfelt welcome!

Private military contractor Kellogg Brown & Root sued for human trafficking ...

Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. ("KBR"), one of the largest U.S. military contractors in Iraq (prior post here), was sued late last week in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, California, for its involvement in the trafficking of 13 Nepali men.
The plight of these men was first uncovered in a 2005 award-winning series by Chicago Tribune reporter Cam Simpson. He described how the Nepali men had been promised jobs in Jordanian hotels and restaurants, but ultimately found themselves being transported against their will to Iraq to provide menial labor at the U.S. Al Asad Airbase. On their way to Iraq, twelve of the men were taken hostage and executed by the Iraqi insurgents, their executions filmed and posted on the internet. The 13th trafficking victim, Buddi Prasad Gurung, who was being transported in a different vehicle, arrived at the U.S. military facility in August 2004. There, the lawsuit alleges, he was held against his will for 15 months and forced to work as a loader/unloader in a warehouse supervised by KBR. Represented by the Washington, D.C., law firm Cohen Milstein, Gurung joined the survivors of the 12 deceased victims to filing claims under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, RICO, and the Alien Tort Claims Act.
This lawsuit highlights an under-reported and long-ignored facet of the global human trafficking problem -- the trafficking of men for forced labor.
While human trafficking has become a hot issue in recent years -- even Lexis Nexis has a campaign against trafficking -- most of the attention has traditionally been focused on the trafficking of women and girls into the sex industry. But as recognized under international law (the 2000 U.N. Trafficking Protocol), traffickers are equal opportunity exploiters, trafficking women, men, girls, and boys into a wide range of labor sectors, including forced agricultural, construction, and domestic work.
The U.S. government is finally starting to address the broader spectrum of trafficking practices beyond sex trafficking. Take a look at his year's U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, or "TIP Report" (below left), about which IntLawGrrl Karen E. Bravo also posts below. In this year's annual U.S. report card that assesses and ranks other countries' efforts to combat trafficking), the State Department makes an effort to go beyond traditional trafficking stereotypes, and thus to highlight the roles of women as traffickers, and of men and boys as trafficked persons. The 2008 TIP Report also signals the State Department's long overdue recognition that trafficking occurs within the context of otherwise legal forms of transnational labor migration (e.g., the recruitment of the Nepali men for hotel and restaurant jobs).
The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, is making efforts to address trafficking for non-sexual exploitation. In the draft Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, Congress has proposed measures to prevent labor recruitment abuse and to address diplomat abuse of domestic workers, the latter issue the subject of a recent, scathing critique of the State Department by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Questioning corporate responsibility claims

The knowledge that many IntLawGrrls work on the development of transnational norms designed to hold corporations to account perhaps militates against this post, which is spurred by 2 recent IntLawGrrls items (here and here). Conversely, the same knowledge counsels in favor of posting, for the reason that voicing doubts may give rise to a healthy and informative debate.

These days, calls for creation of transnational norms seems de rigueur in human rights circles. That fact is demonstrated not only in IntLawGrrls' prior posts on transnational norms, private contractors, and Alien Tort litigation against corporations, but also by the many symposia (examples here, here and here, and slated for next week, here) that nowadays are devoted to the subject.

The calls have been:

► critical (of corporations); and, at the same time,

► optimistic (about a future in which corporations assume responsibility for the social cost of their activities).

Yet in the end, the conferences have not convinced; at the least, they have yet to convince this attendee.

It is refreshing to hear a corporate mea culpa voiced at such conferences. Still, it is hard for a skeptic not to feel that more than one such corporation simply has assigned to employees -- or even outsourced to outside consultants -- the task of assuaging by apology, even as the corporation itself continues business much along the same lines as usual. It is hard not to assume that paying someone to play this role has become a cost of doing business -- a cost far cheaper than that of making any actual change in practice.

Meanwhile, some aspects of the corporate accountability issue seem to get short shrift:

► Economics. There seems far more need for consideration of hard-nosed economics, for an answer to this question: How can critics of current practices make the maintenance of those practices no longer worth the corporation's trouble? Economic imperative seems far more likely to move corporate behavior than voluntary feel-good/sound-good norms.

► Enforcement. In the United States, at least, much corporate reform has occurred only at the behest of government-urged regulation. Thus did the novelist Sherwood Anderson mark the birth of "corporate accountability to the community" not in some industry-driven initiative, but rather in the Depression-era government hearings at which "'for the first time ... men of business'" were "'coming up on the platform to give an accounting.'" It was that government-required event that injected "'an entire new principle in American life,'" and the corollary "death knell of the old idea that a man owning a factory or store has a right to run it in his own way.'" (Anderson's quoted on page 303 of The Defining Moment, Jonathan Alter's excellent study of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1st 100 days as President).

Some current proposals would invoke the repressive power of many states to punish corporations, an approach I questioned in a 2001 article. At the other extreme are those current efforts that seem to depend on corporate self-control, perhaps buttressed by a "global governance" system not yet in place. The effectiveness of such a regulatory framework remains much in question.

► Theory. Statements respecting corporate social responsibility seem to take as given that corporations indeed bear such responsibility, in a manner analogous to responsibility that states bear to persons within their jurisdiction or control. But the proposition is not self-evident. Anyone who looks for inculcation of a corporate social responsibility norm ought to welcome the development and dissemination of rationales privileging that norm over the laissez-faire and free market traditions that retain much rhetorical -- and, indeed, real -- force in today's world.

Having ventured these observations from an admittedly ill-informed vantage point, I welcome others' insights and responses on this critical question of how to hold businesses accountable for what they now seem to manage to deflect as "externalities"; to hold them accountable, that is, for the social costs of doing business.

(image from poster for 2003 Canadian documentary film "The Corporation")

Look On! "Iraq for Sale"

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.) Want to put in context recent headlines respecting 1 of the several private military contracting companies at work in Iraq; that is, "State Dept. renews Blackwater contract" and "Iraq Contractor in Shooting Case Makes Comeback" and "Blackwater’s Impunity"?
Then try to view the documentary "Iraq for Sale."
Though released 2 years ago, the film tells a story that remains fresh to this day. The 75-minute film is circulating widely now, not only via DVD sales and organized screenings, but also via some cable companies' "on demand" movie feature.
Thought I knew lots about the workings of these companies. The role that private contracting played in abuse at Abu Ghraib, for instance, a shameful episode that indeed is stressed in this film. But the film makes sadly clear that Abu Ghraib is only 1 of many stories to be told. Also aired are allegations that CACI hired translators who couldn't translate, that KBR supplied soldiers contaminated water, that Blackwater knowingly led unknowing civilian truckers into a combat zone where many died. More gripping than the allegations is the anguish of surviving former employees and of the survivors of those who died. A translator says people died because of bad translations. A purification specialist is visibly sickened when talking of the GIs who go home not realizing they have waterborne illnesses. The voices of the surviving truckers, big men, crack when they recall their friends' death under fire.
One of those interviewed puts it all in perspective: A true patriot, he says, would demand that these companies, and the officials who hired them, be held fully accountable.

Coalition of the billing: contractors in Iraq

I have to give credit for that snappy title to Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who's written on military contracting. Cited in the LA Times, Singer quipped that the figures on who’s fighting in Iraq indicate that it’s not a “coalition of the willing”, as originally touted. Even counting the recent troop buildup, American military personnel (160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees) are outnumbered by the 180,000 American, foreign and Iraqi civilian contractors. Apparently, using private contractors is nothing new—the practice dates at least to the American Revolution. Functions vary, from construction to security to weapons system maintenance, and some military officials claim that having contractors cuts costs and allows troops to get down to the business of fighting. But William Nash, a retired Army general and reconstruction expert, claims that “hiring guns” is not only “obscene”, but dangerous, because the military doesn’t have control over all of the coalition forces’ guns. Another danger is that contractors can and have refused to deliver supplies in combat zones. Still another danger is the lack of accountability: there is no centralized record, so we don’t know how many contractors there are, or where they are. In addition, private security contractors have been involved in firefights with Iraqis, but only a few have been prosecuted for serious crimes committed by American forces (contractors are immune from criminal prosecution in Iraq and not likely to be successfully prosecuted in the US, particularly given the limitations on the War Crimes Act imposed by the Military Commissions Act). But accountability for crimes in Iraq doesn’t stop at equal treatment between soldiers and contractors. As we’ve seen with the torture at Abu Ghraib, lower-level troops have been court-martialed while the top brass has escaped censure, with the notable exceptions of Generals Janis Karpinski, who was demoted, and Antonio Taguba, who says he was forced to retire after his investigation into the matter . See also yesterday's post by Vera Brittain noting lower-level prosecution, whereas there may be a generalized problem with troops from Camp Pendleton. Who's doing the training there?