Last week, a federal jury ordered a defense contracting firm, CACI International, to pay $42 million dollars to three Iraqi men who were tortured two decades ago at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The complaint alleged that CACI employees, who worked as interrogators for the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib, were complicit in the abuses committed there by U.S. Army personnel, which included holding prisoners in stress positions, inflicting forced nudity on them and using dogs to threaten them.
The three litigants were part of a much larger group of detainees victimized by the U.S. military and defense contractors in the post-9/11 “war on terror.” Abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were endemic until 2004, when they were leaked to the media and widely condemned. A few military personnel were court-martialed at the time, but this new verdict is the first case against a corporation for its role in the atrocities. It was also, however, the first time that any of the Abu Ghraib victims were heard by a jury in court or received any kind of reparations for what they experienced.
Perhaps more importantly, however, this case also represents the latest success story in an important global trend: the pursuit and achievement of justice on behalf of human rights victims not just against private actors but also by private, nongovernmental civil society organizations that substitute for and/or augment regular law enforcement. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed this claim on behalf of the plaintiffs, has a history of using available judicial mechanisms in this way. But a bevy of other nongovernmental organizations do similar kinds of “law enforcement” work—which includes gathering and collating data, arguing for criminal prosecution through international courts and, when that fails, suing states and corporations for civil reparations—when state responses to human rights atrocities committed by corporations or states themselves are inadequate.