Private Security, Human Rights and COVID-19: Regulatory Challenges at the Margins

The increasing use of private security by States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fast outsourcing facilitating that use, raises immediate challenges to the international legal order, and specifically to the protection of human rights, particularly for marginalised groups. It also reinforces existing fundamental questions about future regulation and governance of the private security sector at both the international and national levels. This essay assesses the impacts and consequences of the use of private security companies during the global pandemic by: (1) identifying the challenges for the rule of law due to the use of emergency procurement rules by States to outsource security; (2) highlighting the negative impacts on human rights as a result of using private security during the pandemic, especially for groups marginalised by race, ethnicity, poverty, disability, gender, sexuality or other status; (3) examining the reorientation of services provided by the private security sector towards humanitarian and medically-related activities and the human rights consequences; (4) exposing regulatory weaknesses. It concludes that emergency legislation expediting the use of private security must not become normalized, despite the pandemic, that States and private security companies must pay particular attention to the significant risks of human rights impacts, particularly for marginalized groups, and that the international and national regulatory regimes for private security are of limited effect in current circumstances and require urgent attention.