Nearly two years after announcing it would not renew contracts with the Israeli prison system, global security firm G4S has announced that it plans to pull out of the Israeli market entirely.
"Through our continuing portfolio management programme, we also expect to exit a number of other businesses with combined revenues of c.£400 million in the next 12 to 24 months including G4S Israel, UK Utility services, US Youth Justice services and UK children’s services," the company said Wednesday in its 2015 annual report .
The company, which is the largest security firm in the world, has been a target of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement for years over its work in Israeli prisons and in the occupied West Bank. G4S provides equipment for several prisons and detention centers and also has contracts to provide services, including guards, for Israeli security services, including at checkpoints along the illegal separation barrier that Israel has erected in Palestine.
In June 2014, shortly after the Bill Gates Foundation and the U.S. United Methodist Church divested from the company over its work in Israel, G4S said that it would not seek to renew its contracts with the Israeli prison system as they expired over the next three years. However, the company only made a weak commitment on the contracts with the prison services, and has a history of misleading the public on its involvement with Israel, according to Electronic Intifada . It also made no commitment on its other contracts in Israel, including services provided to illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Since 2014, BDS activists have continued to apply pressure to the firm, with significant successes as UNHCR, UNICEF, the Irish government and numerous universities and local authorities around the world terminated contracts with G4S, according to BDS .
With the extended time frame the company announced for the sale, it will likely be sometime before the BDS actions against it end – but announcing the decision in its annual report is the most concrete step that G4S has taken yet to end its complicity in the human rights abuse and violations of international law in Israel and the occupied territories.