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Private security is not just a business and should be regulated accordingly – preferably with a pan-EU versus local approach
Governments have a basic responsibility at the national and EU level to protect society from risks, harm and breaches of basic rights, such as privacy. Current national capitals follow this principle when handling private security challenges. But the status of statutory private security regulation was excluded from the EU’s Services Directive. Meanwhile, it seems the EU Commission does not give much priority to this.
We think this situation must be changed so that private security is addressed at EU level.
Europe’s expanding manned private security sector, with its 45,000 companies and 1.7 million employees, represents a force with no short term alternative to secure our societies. To keep it flexible and capable of reacting quickly and to meet society’s security needs in a productive and controlled way, a harmonised but non-discriminatory regulation is the effective way ahead.
Resent research shows that 25 out of 27 EU states have regulated in some way the private security service activities and players. A vast majority of this regulation is quite new or upgraded, originating from the last 10 years, and not a single country has deregulated or has plans of deregulating the private security sector. This is not only a European trend but an international one.
Of the 25 countries with some sort of private security regulation, 23 have organised it under either their interior or justice ministry. Governments traditionally consider private security providers as a part of the ‘law and order’ structure of their societies. They regulate private security for three basic reasons, namely to:
- protect constitutional and human rights of those affected by private security providers’ activities;
- keep organised crime and criminal elements out of the business and prevent persons with a criminal record or unsuitable character to work as security providers;
- ensure a certain level of know-how among private security personnel via compulsory training.
States today are incapable of maintaining the required service levels and visibility in their public security. Inadequate resources and bureaucratic inflexibility of police organisations, for example, have meant that in many countries their changing security needs have not fully been met. This vacuum has often been filled, whether by design or haphazardly, by private security providers.
Moreover, growing threats to vital infrastructure – facilities, personnel and activities –together with the sector’s increasing privatisation have caused more security to be provided by private players. As a result, the latter have increasingly been drawn into national security strategies and plans as an operational element for achieving the needed level of protection.
Standards and codes of conduct are important to complement binding legislation, but are no alternative to it, and yet finding one regulatory solution that fits all contours across the EU is next to impossible. The most common private security regulation models revolve around various laws that define the requirements and ways of action for public authorities rather than functioning as statues to steer private businesses and markets.
This needs to be turned around: in future the private security sector should be primarily understood and handled in a regulatory context as a part of national security rather than strictly as a business activity.
But can we get there?
Across the EU’s three branches, and particularly within separate policy units across the European Commission, private security is perceived in diverse ways. Some policymakers see the industry purely in economic terms while others do, indeed, consider it as a security stakeholder. The ‘economic’ school of thought in certain EU policy circles would abolish existing national statutory control mechanisms. The danger, however, is that this approach could allow organised crime or unqualified players to use private security locally and transnationally as a disguise for illicit activities. That would be the risk if European Commission were to produce a plan that overrules national statutory private security regulation with a directive based purely on a free market mantra.
At any rate, it will be extremely difficult to harmonise private security regulation separately from harmonisation of national security and law enforcement (police) activities. As long as the so-far un-ratified EU Lisbon Treaty sits idle – thus leaving EU justice and home affairs decisions split between the varying so-called ‘first’ and ‘third-pillar’ legal foundations – then progress in harmonising the national status of private security across the 27 member states is unrealistic.
Jorma Hakala is a non-executive director of Securitas Oy Finland, posted in Helsinki.
October 2008 © Copyright: SecEUR sprl
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