Yale’s Contract with G4S

In 2014, Yale began its contract with AMAG, a subsidiary of G4S. G4S is one of the world’s largest private security companies, and it is complicit in some of the world’s worst human rights abuses. Because of Yale’s decision to upgrade the university’s security system with G4S technology, Yale now uses the same technologies used by private prisons, migrant detention centers, and the apartheid regime in Israel.

What is G4S?

The Israeli state uses G4S equipment in order to maintain its prisons, checkpoints, and the apartheid wall that separates the West Bank from the rest of occupied Palestine. These technologies exist to violently police and restrict the mobility of Palestinians. The BDS movement has already pressured the company to abandon its deals with the Israeli prison service. In December 2016, G4S sold its Israeli subsidiary to the Israeli equity fund FIMI. 

However, G4S still holds a 25-year contract to build and operate the Israeli National Police Academy. G4S is training Israeli cadets in “crowd control, house raids, interrogation techniques, target shooting and undercover operations - repression tactics that often entail egregious human rights violations and war crimes committed exclusively against Palestinians.” G4S at its core is a company that reinforces and enables dehumanizing military, policing, and securitization efforts that violate people’s rights. 

In addition to taking part in the Israeli occupation, G4S is also responsible for atrocities at the US-Mexico border including abuse of detained people. G4S also operates the Mangaung Correctional Centre in South Africa, the world's second-largest private prison, where they were investigated for inmate abuse and unnecessary use of electroshock therapy and forced injections. Finally, multiple organizations have cut ties with G4S over workers' rights abuses where G4S paid migrant workers less than promised, withheld overtime wages, confiscated passports, and threatened deportation.

Our Campaign

The principal method for pressuring universities to dissociate from the Israeli occupation is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS is a movement called for by Palestinian civil society and modeled on the South African liberation movement. 

We aim to build on this movement by pressuring Yale to end its complicity in funding apartheid in Israel. We demand that our administrators cancel Yale’s security contract with G4S. This campaign presents the students of this university with the opportunity to take a practical step forward in the advancement of Palestinian rights.

It is important to make clear that our campaign is not a campaign against Jewish people but rather a campaign against a state engaged in what the United Nations has called settler colonialism. For the above reasons, we call on Yale to cut ties with G4S and end its complicity with the injustices G4S commits throughout the world.