South Africa was urged on Friday to complete and start enforcing all the regulations of its 2006 law preventing its citizens from becoming mercenaries.

At a press conference in Pretoria, the chairperson of the United Nations working group on mercenaries, Alexander Nikitin, said that South Africa's Prohibition of Mercenary Activities and Regulation of Certain Activities in Areas of Armed Conflict Act, which was passed in 2006, was pioneering legislation, but it still needed to be successfully implemented.

"The government of South Africa should pursue its efforts to strengthen the regulatory framework for private military and security companies exporting their services abroad," he said.

The working group has spent the past nine days meeting with various government officials and ministers, including Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma.

Another member of the working group, José Luis Gómez del Prado, said that the US and Britain's outsourcing of what were originally national security functions was creating a demand for private security companies and personnel.

He said that the lines between security work and the traditional mercenary activities, like those of Mad Mike Hoar in the Congo in the 1960s, was becoming increasingly blurred.

Nikitin said that during the group's visit, they had been assured by the government that enforcement of the legislation would begin to take place.

"We are very unhappy with the way the UK and the US control their security activities. These are inherently state activities that are being outsourced," said Gómez del Prado.

The US ultimately did not have the manpower to go to war in Iraq and that for every legitimate military person in Iraq there was a private contractor.

"We are going towards the privatisation of war," he said.

Nikitin said that the downsizing of military forces globally was creating a demand for private security firms, whose actions often ultimately violated the human rights of the citizens in the country in which they were deployed.

That same downsizing created a pool of skilled military personnel, including South Africans, from which the unregulated private security companies could draw personnel.

Gómez del Prado cited as an example the controversial company Blackwater, whose forces' actions had resulted in the wounding and deaths of several civilians in Iraq. The company became infamous for the Nisoor Square massacre that killed seventeen civilians.

"Security companies are not business as usual. They should be regulated differently," said Nikitin, adding that the South African legislation was pioneering the way in which security companies were regulated.