Antony Loewenstein

My film Disaster Capitalism, with director Thor Neureiter and co-producers Media Stockade, has screened around the world this year (with more to come including an invitation to a major human rights film festival in the US in early 2019). 

After one of the recent screenings in Sydney, this review by Jim Mcllroy appeared in Green Left Weekly:

Disaster Capitalism is a groundbreaking documentary film about Bougainville, Haiti and Afghanistan, revealing the dark underbelly of the global aid and investment industry. The film offers important insights into a secret multi-billion dollar world by investigating how aid money is actually spent — or misspent.

Prominent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein joins award-winning filmmaker Thor Neureiter on a four-year journey through the world of shady mining companies, corrupt and failing governments and resilient local communities.

Narrated by Loewenstein, the film takes us to war-torn Afghanistan to interview leading community figures struggling to defend local village residents against the depredations of overseas mining companies. He reveals the startling fact that the US has spent more on so-called “development aid” in Afghanistan over the past 15 years than it did on the entire post-World War II Marshall Plan to reconstruct a devastated Europe.

Despite this huge sum, Afghanistan remains a failed, corrupt state, riven by an endless war with the reactionary Taliban. The great majority of its people live in dire poverty and insecurity.

Speaking at a showing of the film at the Edmund Rice Centre on November 14, refugee rights activist Phil Glendenning noted the Afghan government still spends half of its national budget on defence and security. Yet the ongoing violence still leaves people desperate for peace.

In Haiti, the film shows the terrible aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and the failure of UN and other foreign aid to significantly improve the conditions for the poor majority. Thousands died because of dysentery introduced to the country by UN personnel.

Instead of using aid to re-develop destroyed public infrastructure, the US and other rich countries focused on setting up free-trade zones to further exploit local workers with encouragement from corrupt Haitian politicians.

Loewenstein also visits Bougainville, currently a province of Papua New Guinea, which was ravaged by a long civil war in which a reported 20,000 people were killed. The war was launched by the PNG government, with the full backing of Australia, when local people rose up against the destruction of their island by mining giant Rio Tinto in the 1980s.

We hear the voices of independence leaders and local women villagers, who express a desire to control their own affairs as a precondition to any new resource projects being initiated.

The film is partly based on Loewenstein’s 2015 book Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe. For the book, Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the US, Britain, Greece and Australia to witness the reality of rampant capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organised misery in the hidden world of privatised detention centres, militarised private security, aid profiteering and destructive mining.

Loewenstein concludes the film by stating: “In the end, the solution lies with the people and communities.”

Disaster Capitalism starkly exposes the reality of big business and its agents in utilising natural and human-made calamities for greed and profit. It ends on a hopeful note that communities which suffer this exploitation are beginning to rise up and demand their right to democracy and real development in the future.

I was interviewed late last week by the US radio program, Loud and Clear, from Washington DC:

In today’s episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Fred Magdoff, professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont, and Antony Loewenstein, an independent journalist and author of “Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.”

Last week, just before Thanksgiving, the White House did everything it could to bury its own report on climate change, which Donald Trump says he doesn’t believe. But the science is in andclimate change is here and is already affecting our health, with extreme heat having an effect on productivity, the food supply, and disease transmission. And the last four years have been the hottest in recorded history.

My segment starts at 16:30:

Listen to “Climate Change: The Fight of Our Lives” on Spreaker.

I recently published a major investigation into Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his aims to exploit resources and minerals in Afghanistan. It was published by the global broadcaster TRT World and created waves.

Yesterday Prince himself was interviewed on the TRT World program, Nexus, and directly asked about my reporting that he travelled to Afghanistan as “Trump’s advisor” and met with senior members of the Afghan Ministry of Mines. He didn’t refute or deny anything and instead seemed to basically confirm it.

The whole interview with Prince is superb, grilling him about his past work and future plans, but the relevant section about Afghan resources, his plans and my reporting begins at 13:27:

Interview on TRT World’s The Newsmakers program, the global news network’s flagship current affairs show on a channel that reaches 260 million people in 190 countries, about my recent investigation into Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his attempts to exploit Afghan resources:

My year-long investigation in TRT World, the global news network that reaches 260 million people in 190 countries, about Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his attempts to exploit Afghan minerals (plus here’s background to the making of this story that continues to reverberate around the world):

Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater, now known as Academi, has trained his sights on mining natural resources in war-torn Afghanistan, according to multiple sources and Afghan officials.

Details from Afghan officials and conversations with two sources knowledgeable about Prince’s movements in Kabul say he is looking into opportunities to mine Afghan minerals and visited the country in early 2018 and September to explore these possibilities.

Prince, who is the chairman of logistics firm Frontier Services Group, had pitched a plan to privatise the Afghan war and mine the country’s minerals to the White House last year.

His proposal included finding rare earth minerals in some of Afghanistan’s most volatile regions, allowing the United States to source valuable lithium for batteries, along with other deposits, and provide jobs to Afghans.

Prince and his associates met key figures in the Afghan mining ministry in January 2018, an Afghan government official with knowledge of Prince’s schedule told TRT World.

Team4RMC—an Afghan security company that was assisting Prince—requested a meeting for him with Afghan Mining Minister Nargis Nehan to discuss his plans to invest in the country, and described him as a “current advisor” to President Trump.

Prince and his associates, including Frontier Services Group head in Afghanistan, Shahin Mayan, met officials at the Afghan Ministry of Mines on 13 January.

Mining Minister Nargis Nehan was out of the country, so they met a deputy minister and other officials.

Team4RMC claimed Prince was also meeting President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and other high-level officials.

In late 2017, according to a Kabul-based source and Afghan mining expert, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of safety and losing his job, officials from the Department of Commerce and United States Geological Survey working with the United States embassy in Kabul, visited the country to investigate ways in which minerals could be found and mined.

The Afghan mining expert tells TRT World that the Trump administration officials sought access to the resources map archive, researched by Soviet geologists in the late 1970s and 1980s and by American geologists after 2001, to determine the quality of the minerals and see samples of them.

The Soviet mineral data charts are far more extensive than the US efforts, according to an Afghan mining expert who has been researching the issue for over a decade and has documented the various local and foreign attempts to exploit the country’s resources.

This, the expert says, could be because the Soviets progressed further with their mining plans; they extracted uranium samples from Khwaja Rawash mountain in Kabul, exploited oil and gas from the country’s north in Amu Darya and coal in Baghlan province.

Building trust 

There’s no evidence that Prince met Ghani or Abdullah, but if he did it would be significant: the New York Times reported in March that Ghani was angry with Prince for meeting his rival Atta Mohammad Nur in Dubai in December 2017.

When I contacted Prince in June, his spokesman said that he “currently had no mining interest in Afghanistan” and denied having any company presence in Kabul.

However, the Kabul-based mining expert—with direct knowledge of the company’s operations— confirms that Frontier Services Group had established an office in the Wazir Akbar Khan area of Kabul, with Mayan leading the company in Afghanistan.

According to TRT World’s source in Kabul, Prince has so far adopted a three-pronged strategy to build trust with Afghans and convince them to work with him.

First, he is attempting to work with Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah and his political party.

Second, he is trying to collaborate and gain the trust of tribal elders and political leaders including Atta Mohammad Nur, and make connections with ethnic groups and influential Pashtun leaders, as well as supporting political candidates in the 2019 presidential election.

Finally, he wants to introduce himself to the Afghan people through the Afghan media including a major TV interview with Kabul-based, Tolo News, in September.

Hot water

Prince’s private security record shows that he thrives financially in places of insecurity.

In Afghanistan, his ability to extract resources will depend on paying off the right warlords and government officials as well as building the most brutal militias to wrestle control of minerals from insurgent groups such as the Taliban and the Islamic State (Daesh) which make huge amounts of money from illicit mining.

The US State Department, when asked for a statement on Prince’s involvement in Afghanistan, declined to comment directly about it, saying that, “Afghan mineral rights are an Afghan issue,” and suggested I speak to the Afghan Ministry of Mines with any questions.

An Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum spokesperson, Abdul Qadeer Mutfi, tells TRT World, “We are currently in the process of amending our minerals law and will be open to receiving proposals that meet our needs and fit the legal framework.” He also says the Afghan government is committed to keeping an “open and accountable extractives sector”.

Another spokesperson, Bhavana Mahajan, told me that the Afghan government hadn’t yet “received anything official” from Prince about his mining plans though the Ghani government was “open to doing business and exploring partnerships.”

The Pentagon has expressed opposition to Prince’s plan to privatise the Afghan war but has made no official comment about his desire to exploit its resources.

A United States Geological Survey study in 2010 estimated that untapped Afghan minerals—including copper, iron ore, rare earth elements, aluminium, gold, silver, zinc, mercury and lithium—are worth between $1 trillion and $3 trillion. Prince’s priorities according to mining experts are lithium, gas and gold.

It is a tantalising but dangerous prospect that could ease Afghanistan’s over-reliance on foreign aid provided Afghans get to reap the benefits.

In February 2018, USAID hosted 80 private business interests in Kabul to explore Afghan resources but USAID refused to disclose who attended the event despite my repeated requests.

President Donald Trump had expressed interest in exploiting Afghanistan’s vast, largely untapped mineral wealth to offset the expenses of the long war, the longest in US history, which has cost the United States over one trillion dollars.

Trump’s interest in Afghan mining and potential economic gains increased after separate meetings last year with Ghani and Michael Silver, the CEO of American Elements, an advanced metals and chemicals production company.

Trump and Ghani agreed in September 2017 to allow US companies access to Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals. Three senior aides of Trump met Stephen A. Feinberg, the billionaire owner of the mega military contractor DynCorp International, last July to explore mining options, the New York Times reported.

Trump is now pushing for direct peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government while encouraging US-backed, Afghan troops to withdraw from vast parts of the country.

Afghans are suspicious of any foreign companies aiming to exploit theirresources. The arrival of Prince on the scene could further raise tempers in Afghanistan.

Prince is infamous in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world because of Blackwater’s atrocious record in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. His contractors killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007 and Prince has been involved in building a mercenary army for the UAE.

Strong networks, weak alliances

Trump’s White House reportedly considered in 2017 establishing a global network of privatised spies organised by Prince and the Blackwater founder is working with the Chinese government to secure its resources in African and Asian nations.

Prince and his family have a long connection to the Republican Party, they’ve been big donors for years, and he considered a US Senate run in 2017, while his sister, Betsy DeVos, is Trump’s Education Secretary.

Prince is under scrutiny for meeting a senior Russian fund manager allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Seychelles in January 2016 and is accused of lying to Congress about it.

President Trump rejected Prince’s plan to privatise the Afghan war, but he has continued advocating this year for the privatisation of the Afghan conflict.

The Taliban announced that they also opposed Prince’s plans, as has the Ghani government.

The New York Times recently reported that Prince visited Kabul in September to discuss his plans to privatise the war and exploit the nation’s minerals. The story stated that Ghani had repeatedly refused to meet Prince despite repeated requests to do so. Prince was said to be building political alliances with Ghani’s opponents to secure access in Afghanistan.

Prince has urged Washington to appoint an American “viceroy” to run the war and argued that “until those plans are enacted there will not be any economic improvements for the people of Afghanistan.”

Will Afghans benefit?

The Afghan mining industry has remained relatively small for decades due to ongoing violence, insecurity and corruption. The Taliban earns large amounts of money from illicit mining, along with the drug trade, but it benefits very few civilians.

The Kabul mining source says that the mining industry is currently valued at $1 billion annually with 25-30 commodities being extracted. Countless more commodities are in the country but exploration and extraction are minimal.

Prince and his associates are attempting to enter the Afghan resources market at a time of intense insecurity in the country. The Afghan Ministry of Mines is a notoriously corrupt government body where there is no transparency around its decisions to appoint contracts to favoured bidders.

Prince’s company is unwilling to reveal its plans publicly because mining resources in a war zone is controversial, always occurs without community consent, and inevitably worsens violence in the areas targeted for exploitation.

The Ghani government recently signed large contracts with Afghan and foreign companies in a veil of secrecy to exploit resources in some areas controlled by insurgents.

Opponents of privatising Afghanistan’s resources, such as Integrity Watch Afghanistan and international NGO Global Witness, have expressed concern that without major governance changes these contracts will only worsen violence and entrench the power of warlords.

In a joint opinion piece by the two groups in January, they wrote that the Trump administration and Ghani government risked echoing a colonial past.

“For Afghans, whose ancestors fought against imperialism just as Americans did, that is a recipe for outrage,” they said.

During my two trips to the country to investigate the resources industry, in 2012 and 2015, it was nearly impossible to find any civilians in Kabul or in the countryside who supported its growth. They all feared worsening violence if anything was extracted because of corruption, looting and the formation of militias around the mines. Ordinary Afghans are rarely consulted about mining plans in their areas and mining contracts are never transparent.

An hour from Kabul, the people living near the Aynak mine – one of the largest copper deposits in the world, which has been leased to a Chinese company – have poor education and little access to water.

During a 2015 visit, the residents of Davo village near the mine told me that they had been promised primary and high schools, new roads, electricity, and a large mosque.

“Our expectations went up, but in the end, nothing was delivered,” Mullah Mirjan, a community leader told me at the time. 

My book review appears in the Weekend Australian newspaper with the great headline: “What did you do in the culture wars, daddy-o?:

In April, Stanford University political scientist Diana Mutz published a study that debunked the myth. “In this election,” she concluded, “education represented group status threat rather than being left behind economically. Those who felt that the hierarchy was being upended — with whites discriminated against more than blacks, Christians discriminated against more than Muslims, and men discriminated against more than women — were most likely to support Trump.”

Australian writer Jeff Sparrow succinctly explains in Trigger Warnings how Trump cleverly skewered his political enemies by appealing to their anger at the elite political and media classes (despite being a member of the elite himself). By damning political correctness without ever describing what it meant, Sparrow explains, Trump convinced his opponents “into calling for decorum, at a time when his supporters wanted to scream their rage”. Trump and his advisers read the mood of the country well and rode it to victory.

Trigger Warnings is a rare book that takes a necessary scalpel to the leftist political persuasion of its author as much as, if not more than, the right-wing agenda he opposes. Near the beginning, Sparrow outlines the bald facts of 21st-century life. With the “world’s eight richest billionaires controlling as much as the poorest half of the planet’s population … a historian of the future might assume that the Left was ascendant: that the injustice under which the planet groaned would be fuelling radical ideas and egalitarian alternatives to the status quo. Such a historian would be wrong.”

What follows is a potted history of how phrases such as “political correctness” and “culture wars” originated and how they have been weaponised today by the Right in ways that largely have trapped the Left, unsure how to respond. Sparrow writes that although right-wingers “portray PC as an Orwellian scheme to end freedom of speech, a deliberate strategy to impose a progressive orthodoxy”, the Left used the term from the 1960s as a gag to mock colleagues who believed in censorship. By the 90s, however, its usage had morphed and the Right claimed that being anti-PC meant “a minority using bureaucratic measures to enforce progressive ideas”.

In a post-Cold War world, where the designated enemy was no longer clear, right-wing politicians and their media cheerleaders correctly believed that by launching multiple culture wars over sexuality, gender, patriotism and morality, the Left would be consumed with these debates instead of challenging neoliberal “reforms” that enriched big business at the expense of ordinary people. It worked in many nations, including Australia, Britain and the US, but there are signs its effectiveness is breaking down.

For example, the electoral appeal of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain is linked to the fact that years of Conservative Party-pushed austerity has led to one-fifth of the population living in poverty. Recent attempts by Theresa May’s government and many in the corporate media to falsely accuse Corbyn and his team of rampant anti-Semitism, a classic “culture war” tactic, has done little to affect his public standing. Whether his popularity leads to assuming power as prime minister remains to be seen.

The strongest sections of Sparrow’s book are his demolition of “smug politics” that have been employed by the Left in the past decades.

For comedians Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, any number of performers who populate Netflix and HBO and “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, the stupidity of vast swathes of the populace was a given. After all, how else could so many vote for George W. Bush or Trump and watch Fox News?

The political ramifications for showing contempt of the electorate are obvious.

“If progressives couldn’t influence society,” Sparrow argues, “that was the fault of society — or more exactly, the people who were too stupid and too venal to appreciate the objective correctness of progressive ideas.” Left ideas will never thrive in such an environment.

The solution to this malaise is (too briefly) outlined by Sparrow but he argues only radical solutions to present-day problems will work. How else to address the climate change crisis without imagining a zero-emissions future solely with renewable energy sources?

Symbolic gestures pushed by celebrities to switch off the lights just won’t cut it; the Left needs to build mass movements for change, an all-too-uncommon occurrence today.

Likewise with addressing the apartheid-level rates of indigenous Australian incarceration. “If we’re not talking about the need for structural change, we’re simply not acknow­ledging reality,” Sparrow concludes. How to achieve this is easier written than done.

Sparrow doesn’t underestimate the challenges and calls for “liberation”, a word that is almost invisible in the modern age. There are successful examples from which to take inspiration, from the struggles for same-sex equality to supporting the legalisation of marijuana across the US.

“Symbolic redress” won’t suffice to help ordinary people facing serious problems, Sparrow says, and the current path leads only to decades more of circular arguments that will embolden the status quo.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author of Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe.

Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right

By Jeff Sparrow

Scribe, 320pp, $29.99

I was interviewed this week on US network The Real News:

The US-based mercenary company Spear Group, headed by an Israeli and hired by a Palestinian on behalf of the UAE, conducts extra-judicial killings in Yemen. Antony Loewenstein discusses the details:

In the last 7+ years, I’ve been investigating and reporting on disaster capitalism around the world. This culminated in my book, Disaster Capitalism: Making A Killing Out Of Catastrophe, and the documentary, Disaster Capitalism.

There’s a great, long essay in the US magazine Public Books about disaster capitalism in the modern age, written by US academic Tom Winterbottom, and he assesses the various ways that three writers view the issue: Naomi Klein, George Monbiot and me. Below are some extracts from the essay:

That there are many cases of disaster capitalism is a point made by journalist Antony Loewenstein in his book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe (2015), and in the 2018 documentary Disaster Capitalism. In these comprehensive and unsettling works, he covers war (in Afghanistan), aid (in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake), and environmental exploitation (in Papua New Guinea). He also cites many other examples of exploitative economic practices—those that aim to make money for corporations or purposefully impoverish citizens—in Greece, the UK, the US, and Australia.

Early on in the book, Loewenstein makes an important terminological point: “Whether we call this disaster capitalism,” he writes, “or just a product of the unavoidable excesses and inequalities of capitalism itself, the end result is still a world ruled by unaccountable markets.” Although Loewenstein neglects to flesh this out, it is a crucial observation: what he sees in disparate locations and contexts is not necessarily produced or predicated by a disaster or extraordinary event. The crisis that Loewenstein documents pervades capitalist societies and lies in actors systematically embracing exploitative and damaging practices in the unfolding of the neoliberal story.

Be it detention centers in the US, relief aid in Haiti, military contractors in Afghanistan, economic sanctions on Greece, complicit corporate-sponsored NGOs in the developing world, or prison systems across much of the Western world, “predatory behavior” does vary “from country to country, but the strategy is the same: exaggerate a threat, man-made or natural, and let loose unaccountable private-sector contractors to exploit it.” Loewenstein frequently uses the term “disaster” seemingly interchangeably with terms like “exploitative,” “crisis,” and “predatory” as descriptors of capitalism. That he settles on no single word is not a weakness, but rather an intriguing diagnosis: capitalism in its current expression and at its worst is all of those things and more.

Once you pry open the terminology a little bit, as Loewenstein implies, one finds that the leverage of “disaster capitalism” now stretches far beyond that which Klein identified. In Loewenstein’s reckoning, there are still the more “traditional” disasters and economic shock therapy “solutions,” and perhaps it is those more obvious shocks that generate the conditions that allow for a particularly nefarious and obvious expression of largely harmful neoliberal capitalism, as is beginning to unfold in Puerto Rico.

In the background, however, a more unsettling picture also emerges, in which those exploitative machinations continue to take hold, progressively and aggressively, even without a disaster or shock. Indeed, after reading Loewenstein’s book, one is left wondering what isn’t impacted by the nefarious tendrils of “disaster” capitalism—education, the aid system, non-profit organizations, the democratic electoral system, privacy, healthcare, big tech, big data, underemployment. Nothing is safe from the imperial reach of a commodified system of capital. Disaster or not, it now seems that capitalism seeks to get into unexplored cracks and expand whether or not we like or even recognize it. A disaster often serves to foreground these ever-present traits. As such, “disaster” may no longer refer to specific shocks or changes in the economic system but rather to the system itself. “Disaster” can serve as a modifier concerning the very nature of capitalism and its development within a broad framework of neoliberalism. That is, it is inherently disastrous and in crisis, not exceptionally.

Klein, Monbiot, and Loewenstein chime with the positive possibility of resolution and change, often by citing cases in which the greedy reach of capitalism has been at least limited: the ongoing fight for Puerto Rico is testament to that. The three authors also ultimately demand—somewhat hopefully, or perhaps hopelessly—a need for modern societies “to view humans as more than just consumers.” Monbiot goes further, pushing for a “regime change,” in which the system is replaced rather than reformed.⁵ As such, their objective seems not to be “benevolent capitalism” or “sustainable capitalism” but rather “not capitalism.”

Back in May, I interviewed UK journalist Johann Hari at the Sydney Writer’s Festival about his new book, Lost Connections, on fresh ways to see depression and anxiety. It was a sold-out event and the full audio is now available:

Too often after natural disasters, corporations are looking to make a profit.

I was interviewed by the US magazine Ark Republic about this issue in a story written by Jesse Shramenko. Extracts below:

Antony Loewenstein, a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist, writer and documentarian made the film, Disaster Capitalism, to address the direction of development in Haiti, Afghanistan and Papau New Guinea. For him, similar predatory choices in New Orleans after Katrina materialized in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.

“After the devastating Hurricane Maria in 2017, there were moves to privatise the water, land and school system,” Loewenstein said. “The country was already financially on its knee, long troubled by a colonial relationship with Washington, but the natural disaster worsened these trends.”

Continues Loewenstein. “Charter schools are now being pushed on the nation without public consultation, akin to how authorities reacted after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In the US, the worst-off children were not helped by this policy.”

The Center for Research On Education Outcomes, revealed data in 2013 showing disparities between traditional public schools and charter schools New Orleans.

Out of 658,720 students, only 37,043 were enrolled in charter schools, 81% of whom were living in poverty. Across the board, Black charter school student and other Black charters had a total of 428 less days to learn math than Black students of traditional public schools who had 156 less days to learn math.

Charter schools, like other businesses that pop up after natural and social catastrophes bank on the misfortune of others, to simply make money, hence the term disaster capitalism. While private enterprise profits from natural disasters, the public ultimately suffers. In other words, death and destruction are big business.

…

Whereas privatizing government housing after Katrina was implemented, privatizing electricity is the agenda in Puerto Rico.

“Policy makers have clear choices when addressing the aftermath of a natural disaster; rebuild public services back better and more resilient to future disasters or abandon public works and solely engage the private sector. The effect of the latter is clear, making many services inaccessible for residents who can’t afford it,” Loewenstein said.

I was happy to sign this recent statement and campaign run by the Australasian Centre for  Corporate Responsibility: 

The position of airlines in respect of participation in forced deportations to danger is clear.

Under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the corporate responsibility to respect human rights means taking measures to avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts. This applies regardless of the size or structure of the business, and over and above local laws.

To discharge their responsibility, airlines should not participate in deportations where there is evidence that the fundamental human rights to an adequate legal process have been denied, as well as where there is a real risk of serious, irreparable harm to an individual.

Relevant international legal and human rights standards in relation to the deportation of asylum seekers include the Refugee Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Given the inadequacy of Australian law and policy in upholding these standards, airlines should engage a heightened due diligence process in order to determine the potential for contribution to adverse human rights impacts before conducting any deportations as a provider of services to the Australian government.

Contribution to human rights abuses and failure to discharge their international obligations can do damage to a company’s reputation, undermine its social licence to operate, and pose material risks to a company’s financial interests.

Behrouz Boochani,  Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, poet and film producer who has been detained on Manus Island since 2013
Brynn O’Brien, Executive Director Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Tanya Jackson-Vaughan, Executive Director, The Refugee Advice and Casework Service
Professor Gillian Triggs, former President of the Australian Human Rights Commission
Janet Holmes à Court
Rhyll McMaster, poet and author and great niece of founding CEO of Qantas Sir Fergus McMaster
Father Rod Bower, Archdeacon of the Central Coast
Carrillo Gantner AO, Chairman, Sidney Myer Fund
Jennifer Robinson, Barrister, Doughty Street Chambers, London
Adjunct Professor George Newhouse, human rights lawyer, National Justice Project
Shen Narayanasamy, Director No Business in Abuse and GetUp Human Rights Director
Nayuka Gorrie, Kurnai/Gunai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta writer
Mark Seymour,  rock legend
John Butler,  singer, songwriter, music producer
Margaret Pomeranz AM,  film critic, writer, producer and television personality
Judith Lucy, comedian and radio, television and film actress, author
Kate McCartney, writer, director, performer
Marieke Hardy, writer, broadcaster, television producer
Tom Zubrycki, documentary filmmaker
Holly Throsby, musician, novelist
Margaret Throsby AM, ABC broadcaster
Tony Wheeler AO, publishing entrepreneur, businessman and travel writer, co-founder of the Lonely Planet guidebook company
Michelle de Kretser, novelist
Thomas Keneally AO, Ambassador, Sydney Asylum Seeker Centre, novelist and playwright
Andrew Bovell, writer for theatre, film and television
Benjamin Law, author, broadcaster and TV screenwriter
Christos Tsiolkas, author, playwright, essayist and screen writer
Nigel Westlake, composer (Babe score), performer and conductor
Ana Kokkinos, film and television director and screenwriter
Neil Armfield AO, theatre, film, opera director
Tim Winton, writer
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, author, engineer
Linda Jaivin, author and translator
Anna Krien, journalist, essayist, fiction writer and poet
James Bradley, novelist and critic
Alison Croggon, writer and critic
Mireille Juchau, novelist
Gail Jones, novelist and Professor of Literature
Drusilla Modjeska, writer
Professor Terri-ann White FAHA, director UWA Publishing
Dhakshy Sooriyakumaran, founder YLab, Engineer, strategy Consultant
Van T Rudd, visual artist
Fiona Katauskas, cartoonist, illustrator
Mahmoud Salameh, cartoonist, visual artist
Hoda Afshar, visual artist
Alan Hunt, artist
Jiva Parthipan, artist
Andrew Bradley (Quro), musician, artist
Tim “Tigermoth” Paterson, musician, artist
Andrew Garvie (DJ Katch), musician and record label director, founder of Resin Dogs
Alex Kelly, film maker
Asher Wolf, journalist, human rights defender
Robin de Crespigny, author, filmmaker
Christopher Gordon, composer, Deputy Mayor of the City of Ryde
Archie Law, Chair, Sydney Peace Foundation
Glenn Osboldstone, Lawyers for Forests
Lizzie O’Shea, lawyer and writer

Shankari Chandran, lawyer and writer
Robert Henderson, Economics, Finance and Banking Consultant and formerly chief economist (markets) with National Australia Bank
Raj Thamotheram, founder & chair of Preventable Surprises
Pablo Berrutti, Responsible Investment professional
Simon O’Connor, Responsible Investment professional
Matt McAdam, Responsible Investment professional
Phil Vernon, Managing Director, Australian Ethical Investment
Simon Sheikh, Managing Director, Future Super
Terry Pinnell, Chair Ethical Advisers Co-op
Sharan Burrow, General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)
Michele O’Neill, President, Australian Council of Trade Unions
Sam Huggard, Secretary, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions
Luke Hilakari, Secretary, Victorian Trades Hall Council
Meredith Hammat, Secretary, UnionsWA
David Smith, National Secretary, Australian Services Union
Tim Kennedy, National Secretary, National Union of Workers
Jo-anne Schofield, National Secretary, United Voice
Paul Bastian, National Secretary, Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union
Jeanne Rea, National President, National Tertiary Education Union
Michael Thompson, NSW State Secretary, National Tertiary Education Union
Allen Hicks, National Secretary, Electrical Trades Union of Australia
Grant Phillips, Secretary, Newcastle & Northern branch, Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union
Graham Smith, Federal Secretary, Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union
Mick Nairn, President, Fire Brigade Employees’ Union
Susan Hopgood, Federal Secretary, Australian Education Union
John Dixon, General Secretary, NSW Teachers Federation
Annie Butler, Federal Secretary, Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation
Paddy Crumlin, National Secretary, Maritime Union of Australia
Michael O’Connor, National Secretary, Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union
Kate Lee, Executive Officer, Union Aid Abroad, APHEDA
Jacquie Widin, President, SEARCH Foundation
Melissa Parke, former federal member for Fremantle and Minister for International Development
Debbie Stothard, Secretary General and Coordinator, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
Associate Professor Justine Nolan, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Professor Denise Bradley AC
Dennis Altman AM FASSA,  Ambassador Human Rights Law Centre, Patron, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Gay and Lesbian Foundation of Australia
Professor Brigitta Olubas, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW
Simon Holmes à Court, Senior Advisor, Climate and Energy College, Melbourne University
Dr Shelley Marshall, Senior Research Fellow, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University
Dr Julia Dehm, Lecturer, La Trobe Law School
Dr Alice de Jonge, Senior Lecturer, Monash Business School
Chris Nash, Professor of Journalism (Adjunct), School of Media, Film and Journalism, Faculty of Arts, Monash University
Antony Loewenstein, independent journalist, author and film-maker
Tessa Khan, international human rights lawyer
Rawan Arraf, human rights lawyer
Claire Palmer, barrister
Peter O’Brien, Principal, O’Brien criminal and civil solicitors
Tim Lo Surdo, Democracy in Colour
Ben Oquist, Executive Director, The Australia Institute
Tim Hollo, Executive Director, The Green Institute
Christine Milne, Global Greens Ambassador and former Leader of the Australian Greens
Sophie Black, Head of Publishing, The Wheeler Centre
Elaine Pearson, Australia Director, Human Rights Watch
Claire Mallinson, National Director, Amnesty International Australia
Madeleine Bridgett, barrister and Co-Chair Business and Human Rights Sub-Committee, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights
Keren Adams, Director of Legal Advocacy, Human Rights Law Centre, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Professor Paul Redmond AM, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, member of the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group on Implementation of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights
Kon Karapanagiotidis OAM, CEO, Asylum Seekers’ Resource Centre
Luke Fletcher, Executive Director, Jubilee Australia
Lyn Harrison, CEO, House of Welcome
Frances Rush, CEO, Asylum Seekers Centre Sydney
Carolina Gottardo, Director, Jesuit Refugee Service Australia
Phil Glendenning AM, Director, Edmund Rice Centre & President, Refugee Council of Australia
Paul Power, CEO, Refugee Council of Australia
Aran Mylvaganam, Tamil Refugee Council
Brendan Doyle, Secretary, Blue Mountains Refugee Support Group
Margaret Hughes Bennelong Friends of Refugees & Amnesty International Australia
Anthea Vogl, National Convener, Academics for Refugees
Jessie Taylor, President, Liberty Victoria
Dr Safdar Ahmed, Artist and Director, Refugee Art Project
Emeritus Professor Alison Mackinnon, AM, University of South Australia

My interview on US news program The Real News Network on Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his vocal desire to privatise the war in Afghanistan: