GENEVA (5 June 2020) – A group of independent UN rights experts today called on the United States Government to take decisive action to address systemic racism and racial bias in the country’s criminal justice system by launching independent investigations and ensuring accountability in all cases of excessive use of force by police. They also issued a statement regarding the nationwide protests against racial injustice.

The UN human rights experts made the call after a recent spate of killings of African-Americans involving impunity, particular disregard or depravity toward human life, and the use of public spaces to assert racial control, each characteristic of lynching.

“Exactly 99 years after the massacre in Tulsa, involving the killing of people of African descent and the massive loss of life, destruction of property and loss of wealth on ‘Black Wall Street, African Americans continue to experience racial terror in state-sponsored and privately organised violence,” the experts said.

“We strongly condemn the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and call for systemic reform and justice. The latest videos to surface showing white men chase, corner, and execute a young man who was out jogging, or showing an officer kneeling with his weight on a man’s neck for eight minutes shock the conscience and evoke the very terror that the lynching regime in the United States was intended to inspire,” the experts said. “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.”

 

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