April 18, 2019 - Marking a significant victory for the Boycott HP campaign and the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging (FNV), the largest trade union of the Netherlands, with 1.1 million members, has dropped HP as a partner in their offers to their members. The union said in its communication, “as long as we do not know for certain that HP is not complicit in human rights abuses, we will no longer include them as an offer in FNV Membership Offers”.

Sue Blackwell, member of FNV and Boycott HP campaigner, talking about the details of the victory, noted:

Previously the union was regularly offering a 15% discount on HP products: this will now cease.This goes on to show that even if HP-branded companies try to evade responsibility by hiding under their new identities, we will hold them accountable for facilitating the violation of Palestinian human rights until they end their ties of complicity. Profiteering from apartheid and occupation is unacceptable and will be resisted.

Mahmoud Nawaja’a, general coordinator for the BDS National Committee in Palestine said:

We thank the members of FNV, and the FNV staff responsible for selecting partners in its membership offers, for taking this important step in holding HP responsible for its profit-making from Israel’s repression of Palestinian rights. HP-branded companies are facilitating Israel’s apartheid, occupation by providing the Israeli government with the servers that house its notorious population registry and by selling computers to the Israeli military. Its spin-off, DXC Technology, supports Israel’s settler-colonialism by maintaining a facility in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank. We demand HP to end all of these tie-ups that entrench the denial of Palestinian human rights.

In the past, HP has provided services to Israeli Navy that maintains the inhuman blockade of Gaza, has maintained the Basel system, the biometric access control system used to racially profile Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints, and has also maintained record systems for Israeli prisons. We demand reparations for these past contracts that facilitated Israel’s inhuman violations and crimes. HP split into HP Inc and HPE, and went on to build other spin-offs, but despite repeated demands for clarification, HP-branded companies have not provided any evidence that these corporate restructuring processes would have ended the involvement of the HP branded corporates in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Palestinian human rights. Civil society organizations from across the world have urged HP-branded companies to end their ties with Israel, and have stated that the onus lies on the companies to prove that they are no longer profiteering from being complicit.

Over 30 churches in the United States are now HP-free, and many have divested from it. In June last year, the biggest students organization in India, Students Federation of India, with over 4 million members, passed a resolution in solidarity with Great Return March, joining the Boycott HP campaign and endorsing BDS. In April 2018, Dublin City Council became the first European capital to endorse BDS and promised to end its contracts with HP companies and DXC Technology.

The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.