The Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights are the closest thing the private security industry has to a conscience. Shell knows it. Seagull Maritime knows it. This chapter is the evidence that we have not just read them — we have mapped them, embedded them in every live procedure, built the training that drives them into muscle memory, and made them mandatory for every person on our payroll from the bridge to the boardroom.
The Voluntary Principles, the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers, and the Montreux Document are not a decorative trinity bolted onto an existing management system. They are the ethical backbone of how Seagull Maritime thinks about armed operations. Every procedure that touches a weapon, an incident, a detention, or a client interaction is written through this lens — and every person who could conceivably act on our behalf is trained in what that lens requires of them.
The foundation. The baseline. The rights that every person carries with them regardless of flag, passport or the context of the interaction. We train on it because every decision a PCASP operator makes — from a challenge on a skiff to the treatment of a detained individual — can either uphold these rights or erode them.
The VPSHR are the bridge between aspiration and operation. Risk assessment that factors in human rights impact, interactions with public security that preserve it, interactions with private security that enforce it. Referenced explicitly in our SOPs, RUF, Code of Conduct, Social Media Policy, Incident and Crisis Management procedure, and the DD Response Procedure.
The International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers turns the Voluntary Principles into auditable company-level obligations, and the Montreux Document codifies state and contractor obligations under international humanitarian law. Both are referenced directly in our Code of Conduct rebuild and our OCIMF Master Responses.
Honesty first. When the Shell audit landed, our human rights coverage was defensible but not exemplary — references existed, but they were scattered, under-emphasised, and nowhere near the centre of the training programme. The gap analysis below is the honest before-and-after, written without cosmetics.
Every claim above anchored to a live document, a live training course, or a live register entry. No promises, no roadmaps, no "planned for Q3". These are the receipts, and they are all in Chapter 07 · Documents if Shell wants to open any of them in full.
Human rights training at Seagull Maritime is mandatory, not optional. Not a briefing. Not an awareness note. A full course, assessed, recorded, refreshed annually, and tied to a personnel-level completion record in the LMS. The PCASP course is mandatory for every armed operator. The staff course is mandatory for every director, manager, ops coordinator and administrative role.
If a person cannot show a current completion certificate on the Seagull LMS, they do not deploy, they do not dispatch, and they do not sign documents in the name of the company. Every watch. No exceptions.
This is not a compliance exercise. It is a statement about the kind of company Seagull Maritime intends to be — and, just as important, the kind of company we refuse to be.