By Laurie Richardson, UN Liaison
Last June, the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and Philando Castile, together with over 650 civil society organizations, called on the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to convene a special session to respond to the situation of escalating human rights abuses in the United States. They sought the creation of an independent commission of inquiry into recent extrajudicial police killings of people of African descent in the United States, as well as allegations of excessive use of force against peaceful protesters and journalists in the demonstrations in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.In response, the UNHRC held an urgent debate on systemic racism and police brutality, which resulted in Resolution 43/1 which: 1) condemns racially discriminatory law enforcement practices and structural racism in the criminal justice system, as well as the recent incidents of excessive force against peaceful demonstrators; 2) requests that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights prepare a report on systemic racism and violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement agencies, “especially those incidents that resulted in the death of George Floyd," and; 3) requests that the High Commissioner, “examine government responses to anti- racism peaceful protests, including the alleged use of excessive force.”
A virtual event organized by the International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) on November 2 considered the global impact of systemic racism and law enforcement brutality, exploring the lack of accountability for police violence and the importance of the freedom of expression and assembly across the globe. You can watch the video here. Panelists described the background for the Human Rights Council's Resolution: the extrajudicial killings of Black people in the US, especially the death of George Floyd; efforts to suppress BLM protests; excessive use of force against peaceful demonstrators and journalists and escalating human rights abuses. Racial justice advocates made history in the summer of 2020. Civil society movements standing up for racial justice shook the world and reverberated at the level of UNHRC.
Philonise Floyd, the brother of George Floyd spoke movingly about the many other deaths which didn't go viral, and about injustice and police brutality. He said, when you lose a loved one, you never get them back. If something good could come out of George's death, that Breanna Taylor, Jacob Blake and many others are household names now. He is working to get out the vote and spreading the message that Black Voters Matter.
A representative of the lawyers defending the rights of victims' families thanked supporters for helping to get the messages out, increasing pressure to create better laws and social change. The movement is needed now more than ever, with an increase in white vigilante behavior, empowered by police brutality. Possible reforms: independent reviews, independent medical examinations, reducing the power of police unions.
UN member states have failed to confront the impacts of systemic racism, in spite of legally binding international agreements which obligate UN Member States to end all acts of racial discrimination:
The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (1969)
Other violations of human rights and the right to assembly and association include increased digital surveillance targeting the BLM movement, hacking, spreading of disinformation and hate speech on social media, creating divisions and promoting violence. The UN should recognize and promote the BLM movement and the rights of peaceful protesters.
A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that civil society will call for international attention to US violations of human and civil rights, systemic violence in policing and violent crackdowns on protesters. From January 2015 – June 2020, police killed 5,442 people in the US. Black people are three times more likely to be shot than white people. There is a long history of police violence against Black people, dating back to the
first US urban police department – a slave patrol. Only when root causes are explicitly acknowledged can they be meaningfully addressed.
Police reform has been on the agenda at federal state and local levels for decades. It is now time to shift the debate and re-visit the role of policing in democratic societies, acknowledging our histories of structural racism. There are life-affirming alternatives to increased policing: for a start, devoting more resources to building infrastructure that will help communities thrive, and providing for people's fundamental human rights to health care, education and housing.