Final week, a federal jury ordered a protection contracting agency, CACI Worldwide, to pay $42 million {dollars} to a few Iraqi males who have been tortured twenty years in the past on the infamous Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. The criticism alleged that CACI workers, who labored as interrogators for the U.S. navy at Abu Ghraib, have been complicit within the abuses dedicated there by U.S. Military personnel, which included holding prisoners in stress positions, inflicting compelled nudity on them and utilizing canines to threaten them.
The three litigants have been a part of a a lot bigger group of detainees victimized by the U.S. navy and protection contractors within the post-9/11 “struggle on terror.” Abuses on the Abu Ghraib jail have been endemic till 2004, after they have been leaked to the media and extensively condemned. A couple of navy personnel have been court-martialed on the time, however this new verdict is the first case in opposition to a company for its position within the atrocities. It was additionally, nonetheless, the first time that any of the Abu Ghraib victims have been heard by a jury in courtroom or obtained any sort of reparations for what they skilled.
Maybe extra importantly, nonetheless, this case additionally represents the newest success story in an essential international pattern: the pursuit and achievement of justice on behalf of human rights victims not simply in opposition to personal actors but in addition by personal, nongovernmental civil society organizations that substitute for and/or increase common legislation enforcement. The Middle for Constitutional Rights, which filed this declare on behalf of the plaintiffs, has a historical past of utilizing out there judicial mechanisms on this approach. However a bevy of different nongovernmental organizations do related sorts of “legislation enforcement” work—which incorporates gathering and collating information, arguing for legal prosecution by way of worldwide courts and, when that fails, suing states and firms for civil reparations—when state responses to human rights atrocities dedicated by firms or states themselves are insufficient.
