This happened after the troubles in the United States and after the death of George Floyd. (File)
Geneva, Switzerland:
The main human rights body of the UN accepted on Monday a request from African countries to urgently debate racism and police brutality this week after the disturbances in the United States and beyond the death of George Floyd.
While the 43rd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council resumed after the March break of the coronavirus pandemic, the president of the council, Elisabeth Tichy-Fisslberger, proposed to hold the debate Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. (1:00 p.m. GMT).
“I see no objection. So it is so decided,” she said.
It is only the fifth time in 14 years of the Council’s existence that it has agreed to hold an “emergency debate”, which is a special debate agreed during an ordinary session of the Council.
Burkina Faso’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva last Friday sent a letter to Tichy-Fisslberger on behalf of the 54 African countries calling for an urgent debate on “racially-motivated human rights violations, the police brutality against people of African descent and violence against peaceful demonstrations which call for an end to these injustices. “
The call came after Floyd’s family, families of other victims of police violence and more than 600 NGOs this week called on the council to urgently combat systemic racism and police impunity in the United States. .
Friday’s letter said George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25 after a white officer, who has since been charged with murder, pressed his knee to his neck for almost nine years. minutes.
“Not an isolated incident”
His death, which was filmed and which sparked massive protests in the United States and around the world, “is unfortunately not an isolated incident.”
“Many other cases of people of African descent have suffered the same fate because of their origin and the police violence,” ambassador of Burkina Faso, Dieudonné Désiré Sougouri, said on Monday.
While Friday’s letter called for a debate on racism in the world, it notably highlighted the situation in the United States.
“The protests witnessed by the world are a rejection of the basic racial inequality and discrimination that characterize life in the United States for blacks and other people of color,” he said.
Addressing the 47 members of the Human Rights Council, Sougouri stressed that “following the unanimous and general indignation aroused by this situation, it would be inconceivable that the Human Rights Council does not address this issue. current situation”.
A number of countries were to tackle the murder of Floyd and concerns about police violence and racism in the United States when the 43rd Council resumed, even without a special debate.
But as the deadline for tabling new resolutions during this session expired in March, the extraordinary debate offers the only opportunity to propose a new resolution for concrete actions.
The first such urgent Council debate took place in 2010 to address a deadly Israeli raid on a flotilla providing aid to Gaza. Urgent debates also took place in 2013, 2014 and 2018 on the situation in war-torn Syria.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
