Switzerland

5. National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights 

5.7 Pillar 1: state duty to protect 

5.7.3 The State-business nexus [page 24]

Guiding Principle 5

Guiding Principle 5 concerns situations in which private business enterprises provide services on behalf of the federal government. The requirements that the federal government sets for these enterprises draw on Pillar 2 of the UNGP and the expectations for companies described in Section 4.3.

The federal government will employ the following policy instrument (PI) to implement Guiding Principle 5:

PI20 Human rights due diligence for private security service providers 

The federal government uses a variety of services from private security service providers – for example to guard Swiss representations abroad. It is therefore obliged to check whether or not the firms that it engages fulfil their human rights responsibilities.

Article 31 para. 1 b of the Federal Act on Private Security Services provided Abroad states that, in a complex environment, the federal authorities may consider only those firms which are members of the ICoCA68. Since the ICoCA requires that firms abide by human rights standards, this is equivalent to demanding due diligence.

As a general rule, the federal government does not engage any security firms that are not members of the ICoCA to work in complex environments. It advocates that security firms should join the ICoCA, especially in regions in which there are still few, if any, member companies.