UN experts slam 'modern-day racial terror lynchings' in the United States, demand immediate reform
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Isaac Scher
Jun 6, 2020, 00:52 IST
Police shoot pepper spray at a protester in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 31, 2020.Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
More than two dozen UN experts rebuked the United States for "modern-day racial terror lynchings" on Friday.
The United States' "legacy of racial terror remains evident in modern-day policing," they said in a statement.
That legacy originated in an American police force designed as a "slave patrol ... where human property of enslavers was 'protected' with violence and impunity against people of African descent," they said.
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More than two dozen United Nations human rights experts slammed the United States for its "modern-day racial terror lynchings" following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and numerous other black Americans.
The killings all met the standard of "lynching," according to a statement from the UN Human Rights office on Friday. They all involved "impunity, particular disregard or depravity toward human life, and the use of public spaces to assert racial control."
The group includes UN Human Rights Council special rapporteurs and working group members. They previously expressed their concern in a letter to the United States government. The group, which is independent from the UN, advises the international body and conducts fact-finding missions.
Black Americans "continue to experience racial terror in state-sponsored and privately organized violence," the experts said, nearly a century after the Tulsa Massacre, a racial-terror campaign in 1921 led by white mobs who killed 300 black Americans and burned 1,200 homes.
The police killing of George Floyd has prompted global protests, just months after Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor were killed.
"The origin story of policing in the United States of America starts with slave patrols and social control, where human property of enslavers was 'protected' with violence and impunity against people of African descent. In the US, this legacy of racial terror remains evident in modern-day policing," the experts said.
The experts condemned American police violence against peaceful protesters
As Americans take the streets calling for an end to police violence, police have beaten them and fired teargas and less-lethal rounds into crowds, which raises "rule of law concerns," the statement said.
"We are deeply concerned that the nation is on the brink of a militarized response that reenacts the injustices that have driven people to the streets to protest," the experts said in a separate statement on Friday.
The UN cannot enforce international law in the United States, but "is closely following this situation," Dominque Day, a human-rights attorney and the Vice-Chair of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, told Insider.
"Respect, Recognition, and Reciprocity are some key levers that compel sovereign nations to respect and adhere to international law and human rights, including recognizing how racism creates and perpetuates ongoing and systemic grave violations of human rights," Day said. "So in international spaces, the idea is to create a culture of shared norms and values that facilitates peace, prosperity, and international cooperation — for everyone's benefit."
"Eradicating racism — and addressing modern-day lynching — is not only what Americans want, it is good for the United States globally," she added.
In the United States, "the problem is not a few bad apples," the experts said.
The experts demanded immediate national policing reforms
"Given the track record of impunity for racial violence of this nature in the United States, Black people have good reason to fear for their lives," the experts said. "The true demonstration of whether Black lives do indeed matter remains to be seen in the steps that public authorities and private citizens take in response to the concrete demands that protestors are making."
Those demands include reparations, defunding and divesting from police departments, and ending "the war against black people."
The experts advised that the United States must end qualified immunity for police, de-militarize the police, and stop using no-knock warrants and undercover police.
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They said the United States should heed "nationwide calls to rollback staggering police and military budgets." Those funds could be redirected to healthcare, education, housing, pollution prevention, and other social structures, "especially in communities of color that have been impoverished and terrorized by discriminatory state intervention," they said.
The global outcry may have some impact on policy, though advocates say it's only a start.
Los Angeles leaders intend to cut the police department budget by up to $150 million, which is less than 10% of the department's annual $1.8 billion budget.
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