Oliver Bullough in his article for the Guardian explanes the history of privatisation of governmental tasks to banks [*]. He gives the example of what people from Somalia experience with banks:

The tiniest things set off the bank’s suspicions. If she writes a payment reference for an online transfer in Somali rather than in English, the transaction is blocked. If she moves more than £250 at a time, the transaction is blocked until she explains the origin of the money.

It is not only Muslims, or people of foreign origin, or with foreign names who are affected by this.

Private companies, particularly banks, were given a role in fighting crime through the actions of the US, which established an informal world government, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Bullough explains in his article:

The FATF had been created at the height of the “war on drugs” to stop criminals hiding their earnings. The organisation spent the 1990s persuading, bullying and cajoling every country in the world into adopting common standards on regulating the financial system. Its primary weapon was to demand that professionals report suspicious transactions to the authorities, thus allowing governments to stop dirty money at source, with large fines and criminal prosecution for non-compliance.

All non-profit organisations (NPOs) were supposed to be high risk of terrorist financing, which is stupid. Bullough says:

It is true that some charities – or non-profit organisations (NPOs) – had been used in raising funds to support terrorist groups, but so too had businesses, criminal gangs, wealthy individuals and more. But that didn’t matter; banks now had something to look out for: a “charitable or relief organisation … targeted at a particular community”. That dog whistle was loud enough for even the deafest compliance officer to hear.

Of course terrorism is terrible, but harming innocent people and decent NPOs is terrible also:

I am not underestimating the importance of fighting terrorism. I reported for years on atrocities committed by militants fighting for an independent Chechnya. I saw the huddled bodies of young people murdered outside a concert, the scraps of flesh in the snow after a suicide bombing, rows of dead children whose only crime was to turn up to school on the wrong day. A good friend died in a bombing, and I miss him still. Terrorism is grotesque. But you don’t fight terrorism by ostracising blameless people, or by alienating whole classes of the population.

I wonder how many times this needs to be explained to the people who come up with these kinds of rules before they realise that human rights should also be respected in anti-money laundering and countering of financing terrorism.

[*] Other companies currently are also ‘obliged entities’ under international laws regarding anti-money laundering (AML) and countering of financing terrorism (CFT). They were added to the AML/CFT system later when the US feared that criminals would switch to other companies.