New Report And Case Filed On British Company JCB’s Role In Human Rights Violations
On 25th January 2025, the eve of Republic Day, which also marked one year from the International Court of Justice’s provisional ruling on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in a packed hall in central London, The Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign, a coalition of organisations campaigning against demolitions carried out by British construction manufacturer JCB, held a public meeting to launch a new report, ‘Stop JCB’s Bulldozer Genocide’. The report in full is available online at tinyurl.com/stopjcbreport
Speakers at the launch included researcher and activist Afreen Fatima, from India, whose home in Allahabad was punitively demolished in 2022, Lun Fitton from Kuki-Zo organisation Unau (Welfare Organisation UK and International), Palestinian community activists Tamara Ezz El-Din Barbar and Sara Maher Fhedat, from East Jerusalem, whose homes and communities face demolition to make way for illegal Israeli settlements; and Peter Frankental from Amnesty International, who has researched JCB extensively.
The meeting also announced the filing of a complaint with the UK National Contact Point, under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, alleging JCB UK’s failure to take necessary actions to address the adverse human rights impacts resulting from the use of its heavy machinery products in “punitive demolitions” in India. As documented in the Stop JCB’s Bulldozer Genocide report, bulldozers manufactured by JCB, a British manufacturer of construction equipment, are used to advance settlement expansion in occupied Palestine and the punitive demolition of homes, places of worship, businesses and other institutions in India.
Afreen Fatima said: ‘the need to address state violence through demolitions and hold JCB accountable is urgent not just because it reflects corporate responsibility, but because it unearths a deeply entrenched system of oppression and hate that makes such violence possible and even celebrated.
Let me be clear from the outset, demolitions are not neutral acts of governance or administration. They are acts of violence, deliberate, punitive and deeply symbolic.
They are weapons of terror. They destroy not just homes, but entire lives, communities and histories.’
Lun Fitton from the Kuki-Zo Unau Welfare UK and International spoke of the role of JCB just before and after the state-sponsored ethnic genocide that erupted in Manipur in May 2023. Like many other families she had lost close family members to mob lynching on May 4th 2023 in Imphal, ‘Less than a month before violence erupted, on April 11 the state government demolished 3 tribal churches on the pretext that they were built on government land. The church members didn’t even have time to evacuate the properties as JCBs arrived suddenly at 3am in the morning. No similar steps were taken against structures of other faith built on government properties. On February 20 of the same year, a team of police and forest personnel arrived with 6 JCBs to village of K.Songjang in Lamka, my district, and razed to the ground all houses and properties. Today when we look through parts of Manipur on Google Earth, we see flattened and burnt land where our houses, villages and churches used to be.’
The introduction to the report is below:
Why are we campaigning against JCB?
The sun may have set on the British empire but British imperialism lives on. Today’s robber barons are ruthless and unethical multinational companies like J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited (JCB), a British construction company which manufactures bulldozers and other construction equipment.
JCB’s Chairman, billionaire Anthony Bamford or Baron Bamford of Daylesford and Wooton, is a major donor to the British Conservative party and a close friend of Boris Johnson. The JCB empire is controlled by the Bamford family trusts, which have been involved in off-shore tax scandals. Despite this, in January 2025, JCB received a Royal Warrant of appointment from King Charles III in appreciation of its ongoing work.
In Palestine, as Amnesty International write in their report JCB Off Track:
‘For over 50 years Israel has been displacing Palestinians, demolishing their homes, destroying their livelihoods, and seizing their land for Israeli settlers. This is a war crime: a breach of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit an occupying power from transferring its own civilians into the territory that it occupies. British company JCB is a key supplier of machinery used in this systematic violation of human rights’.
Here JCB operates through its sole dealer, the Israeli company Comasco, which holds contracts with Israel’s Ministry of Defence for the same model of JCB machines used in the demolitions and construction of settlements. From as early as 2006 the Israeli military has been photographed demolishing Palestinian homes with JCB bulldozers.
In India, Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has consistently used JCB bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes, shops and places of worship across various Indian states in an ongoing project disturbingly named ‘bulldozer justice’. In fact, as we show in the pages which follow, JCB is so closely intertwined with this project that it has come to symbolize attacks on Muslims. JCB bulldozers have been used to carry out both punitive and arbitrary demolitions. In the punitive demolitions the homes of people accused of crimes, which include protesting against the BJP, are destroyed. Arbitrary demolitions are illustrated by experiences such as that of Hasina Bi, a 56 year old widow from the state of Madhya Pradesh: ‘Everyone at home was asleep that noon, from the fatigue of fasting for Ramzan. Suddenly we heard a lot of commotion outside. We came out and saw four or five JCB machines coming towards our house. The machines directly attacked our house. We weren’t given any notice, nothing’.
In Kashmir, which is one of the most militarised zones on earth, the Indian army has, for decades, acted with total impunity. Despite this, until 2019 the region of Jammu and Kashmir retained autonomy on various internal matters and only Kashmiris were eligible to buy land. This changed in 2019 when India revoked Article 370 of its Constitution. Non-Kashmiris can now buy land and settle in Kashmir. In order to facilitate the entry of Indians and Indian capital, land and property is being acquired, dispossessing local owners without any due process.
A series of demolition drives are being carried out frequently using JCB bulldozers. Many of the properties demolished belong to non-BJP political figures, with authorities making baseless allegations of illegal land acquisition or construction. However, there have also been brutal arbitrary demolitions such as the experience of Suhail Ahmad Shah, a worker in a workshop selling second hand car parts in Srinagar: ‘No notice was served to us. The officials came suddenly and demolished our workshop. No one is listening to us. We’ve been paying rent. Isn’t this an atrocity? They have snatched our livelihood.’
The campaign and its demands
The campaign ‘JCB: Stop Bulldozer Genocide’ is a coalition of organisations with two main demands:
1. JCB must end its relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and cease all activities in occupied Palestine.
2. JCB must commit to ensuring that its products are not used for human rights violations through robust monitoring and prevention systems. This includes making compulsory the use of its existing LiveLink technology to trace and locate JCB machines.
