A number of countries attending a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, on November 9 criticized the United States for its allegedly poor human-rights record, pointing to U.S. use of the death penalty, police violence against black Americans, and the separation of migrant children from their families. The meeting was formally called the Third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United States.
To inform the UPR process, the State Department recently submitted its national report to the Human Rights Council, presenting the Trump administration’s views on human-rights concerns. In response to a number of specifically numbered recommendations from the UN council related to “Racial profiling and excessive use of force by police, and establishing improved police-community relations,” the State Department said:
Each of these recommendations assumes — wrongly in our view — that the United States and federal, state and local governments engage in “systemic” racial discrimination, racial profiling, and that federal, state and local law enforcement officers are regularly engaged in excessive uses of force. We reject the notion that law enforcement in the United States is “systemically” racist. Every day in the United States, tens of thousands of police officers respect, protect, and uphold the rule of law and the civil rights of individuals and communities across the country, while carrying out the difficult and dangerous work of keeping our communities safe.
The Trump administration quit the Geneva forum in 2018 (accusing it of an anti-Israel bias), but the Council nevertheless reviews every UN member country, so the U.S. government sent a delegation to Geneva headed up by Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Robert Destro. Destro defended the U.S. policy positions that were under attack, and said that the U.S. presence at the forum demonstrated a U.S. commitment to human rights.
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NBC News reported that China and Russia — hardly bastions of human rights — called on the United States to root out racism and police violence, while the Communist and Marxist states of Cuba and Venezuela, respectively, asserted that the United States must provide equal access to healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The hypocritical nature of the UN Human Rights Council has been noted in multiple articles in The New American. On October 15, we observed: “Murderous and brutal dictatorships — including multiple mass-murdering communist and Islamist tyrannies — were selected this week to serve on the controversial United Nations Human Rights Council.”
Among these nations is Communist China, which is almost universally recognized as among the worst human-rights abusers in the world.
“Brutal regimes shouting the loudest about our record have the most to hide about their abysmal records,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a press conference on November 10.
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