The group released two joint statements on Friday, prompted by the wave of protests against police brutality that has swept the nation in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, according to Guardian.
The action marks an almost unparalleled outpouring of criticism by the UN’s independent body of human rights experts. Rarely have so many come together to speak as one voice. The language they deploy is also highly unusual in its excoriating critique of what the monitors' state is the “fundamental racial inequality and discrimination that characterize life in the United States for black people”.
Most piercingly, the experts make a direct link between police killings of unarmed African American men today with the spate of thousands of racial lynching that terrorized black communities in the era of segregation.
“African Americans continue to experience racial terror in state-sponsored and privately organized violence … In the US, this legacy of racial terror remains evident in modern-day policing.
The group of 66 experts, known as “special rapporteurs” in the UN system, also has unbridled words for Donald Trump. They heavily criticize his threat to deploy the US military against peaceful protesters as well as his glorification of violence in a tweet in which he said “when the looting starts, shooting starts”.
The UN monitors state, “The response of the president of the United States to the protests has included threatening more state violence using language directly associated with racial segregationists from the nation’s past. We are deeply concerned the nation is on the brink of a militarized response that re-enacts the injustices that have driven people to the streets to protest.”
Agnès Callamard told the Guardian that the joint statement came at a critical time for the UN. “There has never been a more urgent moment for us, UN independent experts, to stand together, speak together and act together. I cannot think of more crucial issues than those we are confronting as a global community.”
George Floyd an American black man died on May 25, 2020 after a police officer pressed his knee into his neck for several minutes even after he stopped moving and pleading for air. The death set off protests that spread across America, and now, beyond.
ZZ/PR
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