Veolia logo
The following press release went out yesterday concerning Veolia, the French company that built the tramline serving settlements in occupied East Jerusalem:
Human rights campaigners are celebrating after the West London Waste Authority (‘WLWA’) excluded French multinational Veolia from a £485 million contract covering 1.4 million inhabitants of the London boroughs of Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow and Richmond-upon-Thames, for treatment of residual domestic waste.
The reasons behind the decision by the WLWA to exclude Veolia are commercially confidential but the impact of human rights campaigners should not be under-estimated.
Over the last six months campaigners lobbied Councillors and Council officials to exclude Veolia from the contract and submitted a letter to the WLWA – signed by nearly 600 local residents – documenting Veolia’s direct complicity in grave breaches of international and humanitarian law in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Campaigners pointed out that:
Veolia helped build and is involved in operating a tram-line which links Jerusalem with illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
Veolia takes waste from Israel and illegal Israeli Settlements and dumps this on Palestinian land at the Tovlan landfill.
The letter also gave evidence of Veolia’s racist recruitment policies in Israel, as well as the company’s operation of buses on Highway 443 which Palestinians are prohibited from using.
Veolia’s failure to win the WLWA contract is a heavy blow for the company because it owns a domestic waste depot in the area covered by the WLWA and so should have been ideally placed to meet some of the necessary criteria for the WLWA tender.
Worse still for Veolia, this blow comes only six months after it failed to win Ealing Council’s £300m new ‘Clean and Green’ contract even though Veolia already did much of the work under the old contract. When bidding for that contract Veolia had faced determined opposition from Palestinian rights campaigners over its track record in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Campaigners across the world are focussed on Veolia because it is a key target of the global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (‘BDS’) campaign for Palestinian rights and which is led by Palestinian civil society organisations.
Sarah Colborne, Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK , commented :
‘Complicity in infringing human rights and international law has become an expensive business for Veolia. Other companies please note: There is a strong, determined and popular international campaign for justice for Palestinians; if you aid Israel’s oppression of Palestinians your business will suffer just like Veolia’s’.
(PSC is an independent, non-governmental and non-party political organisation with members from many communities across Britain)
(Hat tip Omar Barghouti)
excluded French multinational Veolia from a £485 million contract
great news, cut them off at the pass.
Good news indeed, the activists persuaded these London councils to exclude Veolia from public contracts to its “grave professional misconduct”. Under the UK Public Contract Regulations 2006, a contracting authority may exclude an economic operator from bidding for a contract or may reject any such bid where it is found that the individual or organisation has committed an act of grave misconduct in the course of his business or profession. The regulation follows European Law, directive 2004/18/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 31 March 2004 on the coordination of procedures for the award of public works contracts, public supply contracts and public service contracts. Councils throughout the UK and throughout Europe must take this as a precedent or end up in court. Best Christmas present I’ve ever had.
excellent news & major props to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK) & co.
best wishes & plenty of sumud in 2012
Yes Annie, Roger, Roger.
Annie,
I was not Involved with this although I know Danial Machova [solicitor] did a lot of the ground work, I am involved in other prospective legal actions involving Title and Property, Rights and Interests, specifically, property from OPT being sold in UK stores in breach of 1 international Law, and the Resolution passed in 1943 at the International Law conference, briefly its mandate was to upgrade the Hague Regulations as they were not specific enough on property transfers, particularly because of the nazi depredations in much of occupied Europe, these resolutions were put together by the leading jurists of their time and represent the latest and definitive word on the transfer of property rights and interests both within and outside occupied territory, the USA, USSR, China and the United Kingdom and dominions amongst others adopted them, here are the first four resolutions:
(1) The rules governing the validity in third countries of the acts of belligerent occupants and of transfers of, or dealings with, property, rights and interests of any description whatsoever derived from such acts, are rules of International Law the non observation of which entails International responsibility.
Note: In courts of third States cases may be decided according to a variety of legal considerations, but the result must be in harmony with the rules of International Law, the main contents of which are set out below. The Conference has not discussed the conditions under which a third State that does not give effect to the said rules is liable to pay damages to the injured party and/or his State.
(2) The occupant does not succeed, even provisionally, to the status or rights of the sovereign whom he displaces. The occupant has at most, under International Law, only limited rights or jurisdiction and administration; acts in excess of these limited rights are null and void in law and are not entitled to legal recognition in any country.
(3) The rights of the occupant do not include any right to dispose of property, rights or interests for purposes other than the maintenance of public order and safety in the occupied territory. In particular, the occupant is not, in International Law, vested with any power to transfer a title which will be valid outside that territory to any property, rights or interests which he purports to acquire or create or dispose of; this applies whether such property, rights or interests are those of the State or of private persons or bodies. This status of the occupant is not changed by the fact that the annexes by unilateral action the territory occupied by him.
(4) The civil administration established in a country subject to belligerent occupation has no status in International Law. Any rule of International Law establishing the invalidity of transfers of, or dealings with, property, rights and interests effected by the occupant applies also to similar transfers and dealings carried out by any associate or agent of the occupant acting for him or in his interest.
As you can see, the occupant nor his associates or agents has the right to transfer a title of any property, rights and interests whether private or public to a third country in breach of International Law.
This resolution can be used hopefully in our domestic courts. For instance our Sales of Goods Act states that a retailer must be able to pass good title for a sale to be legal etc. I will hopefully have more information in the near future.
Harry