Chapter

Regulating private military and security companies

Iain Cameron

International law and changing perceptions of security : liber amicorum Said Mahmoudi

Leiden ; Boston : Brill Nijhoff, 2014

p. 14-38

English

Photocopies

There are three ways of regulating private military and security companies (PMSCs): through international norms, self-regulation and national norms. The chapter begins by sketching out the legal problems involved in drafting a treaty to regulate PMSCs. These are considerable, and no such treaty has yet been adopted for signature, although a UN working group discussing the issue of mercenaries produced the draft of a treaty designed to regulate PMSCs in 2010. Instead of a treaty, an innovative and intricate system of self-regulation has come into being since 2010, linking states, PMSCs, corporate customers and NGOs. The chapter looks briefly at this system of regulation and then turns to examining developments in Swedish legal regulation in one particular aspect of PMSCs' work, namely maritime security.