The US has slammed the UN Human Rights Council for holding a vote on a resolution that criticized America’s record of police brutality and racism, saying the vote demonstrated “hypocrisy” and showed why the US quit the body.
The UN rights body “has long been and remains a haven for dictators and democracies that indulge them,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said in a statement.
“If the Council were honest, it would recognize the strengths of American democracy and urge authoritarian regimes around the world to model American democracy and to hold their nations to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that we Americans apply to ourselves,” he added.
The @UN_HRC debate on policing and race in the U.S. marks a new low for that body. Our vigorous, ongoing civic discourse is a sign of our democracy’s strength and maturity. We were right to leave this joke of a “human rights” forum comprised of Venezuela & recently, Cuba & China.
The rebuke comes in response to Friday’s resolution, which denounced the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and called on the UN high commissioner on human rights to prepare a report on “systemic racism, violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement agencies” in the US.
The US left the UNHRC two years ago almost to the day, calling it a hypocritical organization that “makes a mockery of human rights” and shows a “chronic bias against Israel.”
George Floyd, a black man, was killed on May 25 during an arrest by a white police officer, who pinned him to the ground and ignored his complaints that he could not breathe.
The on-camera death triggered a wave of outrage across the country, with weeks of large-scale protests in dozens of cities. The unrest and the police response sharply divided public opinion. The Trump administration advocated a heavy-handed law-and-order approach to public disturbances, which his critics branded authoritarian. Many figures in the opposition called for the defunding of police precincts across the country, and some even defended the actions of rioters and looters.
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