A forum for participants of the Montreux Document on pertinent international legal obligations and good practices for states related to operations of private military and security companies during armed conflict.
Research authored by Charlotte Penel and Ulrich Petersohn shows strong evidence of the impact of the implementation of the Montreux Document on the decrease of violence against civilians during and after the end of hostilities.
Commercial Military Actors and Civilian Victimization in Africa, Middle East, Latin America, and Asia, 1980–2011, authored by Charlotte Penel and Ulrich Petersohn and published by the Journal of Global Security Studies, shows strong evidence of the positive impact of the implementation of the Montreux Document on the decrease of violence against civilians during and after the end of hostilities.
With the growth of the international normative framework protecting civilians during armed conflict and the parallel trend of the increased presence of private actors in such settings, Penel and Petersohn explore in their study the impact of commercial military actors (CMAs) on civilian victimization. Through the term of CMAs, the authors examine if private security and military companies, as well as mercenaries, increase the risk of violence against civilians. They argue that the sanctions these actors must face for violation of norms will impact their level of compliance with international norms. To test their argument, they use two different datasets on civilian victimization in four different regions Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia between 1989 and 2018. Through their analysis, the authors find positive results.
The authors confirm that endorsing the Montreux Document increases the chances of compliance with international norms (Penel and Petersohn, 2022: 14). By joining the Montreux Document, States agree on the legitimate services to be traded by PMSCs according to international humanitarian law, which leads their contracting practices to be less harmful to civilians. The analysis not only observes that private security services contracted by Montreux Document participants are more compliant with international legal provisions, but also confirms that the regulation of Home State of PMSCs has an important impact on the level of compliance with international norms. In fact, through their analysis, the authors also confirmed that PMSCs originating from countries with strong human rights standards tend to be less involved in violence against civilians. “If governments that were involved in the Montreux process contracted on the market for force, the incidence rate of civilian victimization decreased by 72 percent” (Penel and Petersohn, 2022: 15).
