UN Report Calls for Reparations for Victims of Systemic Racist Police Violence

[Judi Lynn]

July 6, 2021

The UN high commissioner for human rights grounded her analysis in the long-overdue need to confront the legacies of enslavement, Marjorie Cohn reports.


By Marjorie Cohn
Truthout

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on June 28 released a stunning 23-page report accompanied by a 95-page conference room paper for the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) documenting systemic racism and human rights violations by police forces against Africans and people of African descent throughout the world. The report considered more than 340 interviews and more than 100 written submissions from civil society organizations.

Bachelet grounded her analysis in “the long-overdue need to confront the legacies of enslavement, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism and to seek reparatory justice.” She took aim at “misconceptions that the abolition of slavery, the end of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and colonialism” and subsequent reforms have eliminated “the racially discriminatory structures built by those practices and created equal societies.”

The report finds:

“The dehumanization of people of African descent — a practice rooted in false social constructions of race created to justify enslavement, pervasive racial stereotypes and widely accepted harmful practices and traditions — has sustained and cultivated a tolerance for racial discrimination, inequality and violence, which continues to have a disproportionate impact on the enjoyment of their human rights.”

“Systemic racism needs a systemic response,” Bachelet wrote. “States should adopt a systemic approach to combating racial discrimination through the adoption and monitoring of whole-of-government and whole-of-society responses.” They should be designed “to dismantle systemic racism.”

More:
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/07/06/un-report-calls-for-reparations-for-victims-of-systemic-racist-police-violence/

[cyclonefence]

1. Or you could keep it simple

Any cop, for example, caught abusing an African American has to surrender half his personal wealth (home, car, retirement account, etc) to victim of his/her abuse.

I bet (seriously) that if individuals were made responsible for their own bad behavior the example set for others might have a warning effect to others and might decrease impulses to to continue such behavior.

[David__77]

2. That lets the enablers of police terror off the hook.

The political apparatus overseeing and controlling the police also bear responsibility.