In a move that could only be executed at the United Nations, the organization, which includes such respecters of freedom and liberty as Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, Belarus, and Cuba, decided to launch a probe into “systemic racism” in the United States.
The U.N. has not launched investigations into the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, the status of gay people in Iran, the Chinese Lao Gai concentration camp system, North Korean forced labor camps, Venezuelan suppression of free speech, rampant slavery in Sudan, one-party authoritarian rule in Belarus, or the decades-long jailing of political prisoners in Cuba. Yet those nations will sit in judgement of the United States.
The text of the initiating resolution calls for a commission of inquiry, the U.N.’s most powerful committee designed to inspect human rights violations, to look into “systemic racism” and abuses against “Africans and of people of African descent in the United States of America recently affected by law enforcement agencies.” A look at the human rights records of African nations themselves is not currently on the U.N. schedule.
UN Human Rights Council resumes its work after 3-month delay due to #COVID19, sets date for urgent debate on racial inequality. https://t.co/jhiZPLnw24 via @UN_HRC pic.twitter.com/tVg8d60pOv
— United Nations (@UN) June 16, 2020
American national security leaders were not slow to respond. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley tweeted the resolution is hypocrisy: “America is not perfect, but it’s a farce for the UN Human Rights Council to debate police practices in America, when it refuses to debate concentration camps in China, political murders in Cuba, torture in Syria, state-imposed starvation in NK & slavery in parts of Africa.”
America is not perfect, but it’s a farce for the UN Human Rights Council to debate police practices in America, when it refuses to debate concentration camps in China, political murders in Cuba, torture in Syria, state-imposed starvation in NK & slavery in parts of Africa.
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) June 16, 2020
The commission will “examine the federal, state and local government responses to peaceful protests, including the alleged use of excessive force against protesters, bystanders and journalists.” Botswanan U.N. representative Bokani Edith Seseinyi argued for support for a resolution that “addresses the urgency of the matter today.” Though slavery in Sudan is within geographical shouting distance of Botswana, Ms. Seseinyi chose to ignore that matter and focus on the United States.
#HRC43 has opened & starts w/ GD on item 5. It was decided that an urgent debate on the current racially inspired #HumanRights violations, systematic #racism, #PoliceBrutality & violence against peaceful protests to take place Wednesday, 17 June at 3 p.m. https://t.co/wUEEG9n2Bg pic.twitter.com/8SYNTgRThD
— HRC SECRETARIAT (@UN_HRC) June 15, 2020
The U.N. council agreed unanimously to hold the urgent debate on Wednesday afternoon, regarding “racially inspired human rights violations, systemic racism, police brutality and the violence against peaceful protests in the wake of recent American police killings.”
Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, slammed the debate and resolution: “The main sponsor of the U.N. Human Rights Council resolution singling out the United States is Burkina Faso,” she told media.
Bayefsky quoted the latest report on Burkina Faso from the human rights monitor organization Freedom House: “In June, the parliament adopted a revised penal code that criminalizes the dissemination of information related to terrorist attacks; the revised code also criminalizes speech that can ‘demoralize’ the defense and security services. In other words, it is difficult to imagine the U.N. Human Rights Council, with so many of its members both undemocratic and some of the world’s worst human rights abusers, bringing to bear the moral authority necessary to steer or promote change in a democratic society.”
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