#Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent

[slaveryemembranceday]

In commemorating this day, it is imperative to recognize that people of African descent are disproportionately affected by discrimination, marginalisation and social injustice.

On the occasion of the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a group of UN experts* issued the following statement:

“The International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade is an important moment to reflect on and honour the millions of Africans who, over a period of 400 years, were cruelly uprooted from their communities and enslaved, in Europe and the Americas, in dehumanising and degrading conditions where they endured horrific violations of their human rights, deprivation of their identity and physical, mental, psychological and spiritual brutality.

This day serves as a reminder that the enslavement of Africans gave rise to the systemic racism and institutionalised racial discrimination that their descendants continue to experience today.

In commemorating this day, it is imperative to recognise that people of African descent are disproportionately affected by discrimination, marginalisation and social injustice. Economic disparities, limited access to quality education, health care, housing, employment, under-representation in political, public and private sector leadership, and over-representation in law enforcement especially in the criminal justice system remain their daily reality.

We urgently call for a strengthened collective commitment to acknowledge and redress the enduring disparities and inequalities that stem from this cruel chapter in history and continue to reverberate across generations. We urge States ensure effective participation of people of African descent in decision-making processes and implement reparatory justice measures to redress these long-standing injustices.

We also call on States to proclaim a second Decade for People of African Descent to sustain global efforts to promote the inclusive and sustained development of, advance reparatory justice for, and combat discrimination, systemic racism and social exclusion of people of African descent.”

The experts: Ms. Barbara Reynolds, Chairperson, Ms. Bina D’Costa and Ms. Miriam Ekiudoko, Members, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Ms. June Soomer, Chairperson-Designate, Permanent Forum on People of African Descent; Mr. Tomoya Obokata, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery including its causes and consequences; and Ms. Akua Kuenyehia, Ms. Tracie Keesee, Mr. Juan Méndez, Experts, International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement.

Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN human rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms. Special Procedures mandate-holders are independent human rights experts appointed by the Human Rights Council to address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. They are not UN staff and are independent from any government or organisation. They serve in their individual capacity and do not receive a salary for their work.

[racialdiscriminationday]

Today we join our voices again to urge all States to push forward in the fight against racial discrimination.

“The commemoration of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is a moment to take stock of the persistent gaps in the implementation of our shared commitment to protect hundreds of millions of people whose human rights continue to be violated due to racial discrimination. It is also an opportunity to recommit to our promise to fight all forms of racism everywhere.

Through our work, we see clearly that racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance continue to be a cause of conflict around the world. We are witnessing a dangerous regression in the fight against racism and racial discrimination in many spaces. Minorities, people of African descent, people of Asian descent, Indigenous Peoples, migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, are particularly vulnerable as they often face discrimination in all aspects of their lives based on their racial, ethnic or national origin, skin colour or descent. In this regard, it is crucial that States implement their international human rights obligations and commitments under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

Initiatives aimed at revitalising multilateralism, including the Summit of the Future, provide an important opportunity to firmly establish the collective responsibility of States in ensuring concrete progress to address structural and systemic racial discrimination and its root causes.

The proclamation of an International Decade for people of African Descent in 2014 marked a significant milestone in the global effort to combating systemic racism and racial discrimination faced by people of African descent worldwide.

As the International Decade comes to an end, it is time to confront and rectify the pervasive obstacles and barriers hampering recognition, justice, and development for people of African descent. We call on States to respond to growing calls for reparatory justice and economic empowerment for people of African descent. We also call on States to leave no person of African descent behind in their efforts to realise the Sustainable Development Goals.

Today we join our voices again to urge all States to push forward in the fight against racial discrimination. We also call on States to proclaim a second International Decade for People of African Descent, to ensure greater recognition, justice, and development for people of African descent, including by engaging meaningfully in reparatory justice processes for past injustices.”

*The experts: Ms. Ashwini K.P., Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; Ms. Tracie L. Keesee and Mr. Juan E. Méndez, Experts of the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the context of Law Enforcement; Ms. Barbara Reynolds, Chairperson, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Ms. Verene Shepherd, Chairperson, Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Ms. June Soomer, Chairperson-Designate, Permanent Forum on People of African Descent; and Ms. Hanna Suchocka, Chairperson, Group of Independent Eminent Experts on the Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action

For further information and media enquiries, please contact: Niraj Dawadi (niraj.dawadi@un.org)

[africandescentday]

2nd Meeting, 32nd session of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

Item 6: Thematic Discussion.

TOPIC 1. Trade and Trafficking Routes: Then and Now.

[ausetkmt]

In addition to AI, the 10 Million Names Project is employing oral histories and archived documents to help identify 10 million enslaved people in pre- and post-colonial America.

When journalist Dorothy Tucker first learned about the 10 Million Names genealogical project, it helped amplify memories of long car journeys from Chicago to “Down South” in the 1960’s, where her mother’s family owned land.

The Mississippi property purchased by her great-grandfather George Trice in 1881 was special for several reasons. First, nobody’s really sure how a formerly enslaved man was able to purchase 160 acres, but Trice came up with the $800. And every time Tucker and her family drove down to Shannon, Mississippi each summer to visit relatives, it was more than just a vacation.

“I'd wake up in the morning and have breakfast at my aunt's house. I'd go a few feet down the road and have lunch at my great-aunt's house. And then I'd play outside at my cousin's house,” says Tucker, an award-winning investigative journalist with CBS2 WBBM-TV in Chicago. “It was that way all day long. Every house was owned by a relative. I thought everybody lived like this. I thought everybody had land and stuff that was theirs.”

Tucker finally got specific details about how and why that land was purchased during the final months of her term as president of the National Association of Black Journalists. In early 2023, NABJ Board Member Paula Madison, a retired NBC Universal executive, informed the group about an offshoot of the Georgetown Memory Project, the initiative that unearthed information about the 1838 sale of enslaved Africans to fund Georgetown University. The 10 Million Names Project was created to recover the names of an estimated 10 million men, women and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America between the 1500’s and 1865. By engaging with expert genealogists, cultural organizations, and family historians both Black and white, the initiative hopes to provide more African Americans with information that only formally began to be captured for their ancestors in the 1870 United States Census.

Up until that year, enslaved Africans and their descendants were only acknowledged as the property of their owners. If their existence was noted, it was in the form of sales documents or as catalogued property in civil records. Also, the relatives of enslavers often maintain troves of information about those purchased and sold off that would otherwise be completely lost.

(This database is helping to uncover the lost ancestry of enslaved African Americans.)

Much of the work will be dependent on oral histories passed down thru generations of families, and researchers of the 10 Million Names Project also hope that more white families will aid in the search by making familial records, like letters and pages from family bibles, available to them.

Tucker, who ended her term as NABJ president during that organization’s annual conference in August, revealed at the awards banquet in Birmingham, Alabama that she’d been able to learn more about her great grandfather’s real-estate ventures, through a collaboration between NABJ and the New England Historical Genealogical Society’s American Ancestors initiative.

The 10 Million Names Project was formally launched at the convention. Tucker considers it an especially timely parting gift to her journalistic colleagues. As societal divisions along racial lines widen, hate crimes continue, and attempts to ban books and curtail African American studies programs in schools and universities increase, strengthening historical knowledge is urgently important for Black Americans, Tucker says.

“I think that the ability to tell these stories and to know them is so critically important,” she says. “When you know your personal story, then as a journalist, it gives you the perspective to dig deeper when you're doing the next story, whether it’s about the school board or about Ukraine or the next elections. You know, these stories are all tools that are really good for all of us.”

How the initiative evolved

The man who is the catalyst for the Georgetown Memory Project and 10 Million Names says he’s never really been interested in investigating his own family tree.

“To me, genealogy was sort of like butterfly collecting,” says Richard Cellini, a faculty fellow at Harvard University and founding director of the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Remembrance Program. “It’s impressive because of the amount of effort invested into it. But I never quite understood the point.”

Cellini was born in 1963 in Central Pennsylvania to a Penn State University professor and homemaker mother. His Catholic upbringing steered him to Georgetown University and an eventual decade-long law career before pivoting toward the software and technology realm. In 2015, Cellini learned that his alma mater had formed a working group to explore the sale of 272 men, woman, and children in 1838 to rescue the university from bankruptcy. As a white American of European descent, he says he did not live with or know many Black people growing up, going to school or during his legal and technology careers, so the initiative opened a window in his mind.

When Georgetown President John DeGioia invited alumni to weigh in, Cellini wrote an email asking one simple question that had nothing to do with the university. He wanted to know, “What happened to the people?”

Cellini says a senior member of the working group wrote back to say that research had concluded that all of the enslaved men, women, and children had died fairly quickly after arriving in the swamps of Louisiana where they had been transported.

“And I remember just staring at that email, even though I didn't really know much about the history of slavery or African American history, and just thinking that just doesn't make any sense,” Cellini says. Curiosity drove him to form an independent research group, funded initially through his own credit card and then from other Georgetown alumni who eagerly offered financial backing. To date, the Georgetown Memory Project has fully identified 236 of the 272 enslaved people sold by the university's leaders. Of those identified through archival records, the project has verified more than 10,000 of their direct descendants.

“The 1838 slave sale at Georgetown brought home to me, again, they were real people with real families and real names,” Cellini says. “More than 50 percent of them were children. William was the youngest, and he was six months old. And Daniel was the oldest at 80. Len was sickly, and Stephen was lame. I mean, this is all from the original documentation. From that moment on, I just couldn't get it out of my head.”

The gathering of history

The genealogists and historians connected with the project suggest that the richest vein of information may well be in the oral histories they’ve already begun gathering through hundreds of interviews. They contain fascinating stories like the ones that Kendra Field’s grandmother Odevia Brown used to tell about her African American and Native American forebears in Oklahoma. When Field was in high school, she never really liked history classes, but she always loved her grandmother’s stories.

“It wasn't until I got to college that I realized, thanks to a wonderful professor, that my grandmother's stories were history,” Field says.  After the death of her father, Field began to travel back to those historically Black Oklahoma towns to explore her African American and Creek Indian heritage. Now in her career as a historian, author and professor at Tufts University, Field also has taken on the role of chief historian for 10 Million Names.

Technology, including the use of artificial intelligence programs, is allowing project investigators to do quicker, more efficient searches for information. Field says that can happen by identifying the location of plantation ledgers, advertisements, and receipts from auctions. “Particularly, there's been a lot of advancements made in optical character recognition, which allows researchers to identify names and handwritten records,” Field says. 

Prior to this, a researcher had to find the document, transcribe the information, and then pivot to another database to go deeper. But with the development of other genealogical data sets such as Enslaved.org, locating individuals and making connections becomes much easier. “So that means we can move closer to that 10 million much more quickly than we would have been able to even a decade ago,” Field says. Also, the collection at the Library of Congress, “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938” has yielded important clues from the estimated 2,300 people interviewed during that project.

(The search for lost slave ships led this diver on an extraordinary journey.)

Though identifying 10 million people who were never meant to be known as human beings may sound like a staggering task, the people behind the initiative believe it’s a totally attainable goal—even amidst all the current cultural and ideological turmoil in American society. That’s because, Cellini says, there are certain inalienable truths in this world.

“John Adams said that facts are stubborn things. You know, our Black brothers and sisters have always known their history and white people have always tried to prevent Black people from learning that history. What's new here is that white people are now trying to prevent other white people from learning this history.”

Cellini believes that Black Americans aren’t the only ones who want or need to know the full story. “It's white people who hunger for knowledge of that history, as well. It’s our duty to engage in determined resistance, to strike repeated blows for the truth. And nothing is more stubborn than facts.”

And like journalist Tucker, Cellini believes the search is infinitely for the benefit of the whole of society.

“The hard part isn't the finding,” Cellini says of the effort. “The hard part is the looking. But when we look, we find. And when we find, the whole world changes.”

[reasoningdaily]

Listen to this article hereIt may come as no surprise to Black people in North America that the United States’ closest European ally, the United Kingdom, has been accused of widespread, systemic discrimination against people of African descent.

After wrapping up a 10-day fact-finding mission on the treatment and experiences of Black people in the UK, a United Nations committee expressed “extreme concern” in a letter to the British government last week about its failure to address “structural, institutional, and systemic racism” against people of African descent.

“We have serious concerns about impunity and the failure to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, deaths in police custody, ‘joint enterprise’ convictions and the dehumanising nature of the stop and (strip) search,” the working group said in a statement.

UN working group on people of African descent finds continued systemic racism in UK

Established a year after the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent (WGEPAD) is composed of five independent experts appointed on the basis of equatable geographic representation.

The group sent a 19-page summary of recommendations to the British government on Friday after speaking to hundreds of citizens throughout the country during a 10-day fact-finding mission.

Among the findings, the UN body discovered many Black elderly populations were made to feel like they don’t belong, school police officers regularly intimidated Black children, and the criminal justice system’s practices disproportionately targeted Black people.

What is the Windrush scandal?

Windrush refers to the people who arrived in the UK from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands between 1948 and 1971. The ship they sailed on was called the MV Empire Windrush, according to the BBC.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday in London, Dominique Day, one of the five members of the UN working group, said: “I’ve never visited a country before where there is a culture of fear pervading Black communities – relating to a range of asylum, residency, policing issues. An entire community experiences constant and ongoing human rights violations as a routine and normalized part of daily life.”

It’s unclear whether Day had ever visited the United States. 

British government denies systemic racism

For its part, the British government pushed back against the report’s findings.

“We strongly reject most of these findings,” a British government spokesperson said, per the Guardian.

“The report wrongly views people of African descent as a single homogeneous group and presents a superficial analysis of complex issues that fails to look at all possible causes of disparities, not just race. We are proud that the UK is an open, tolerant and welcoming country but this hard-earned global reputation is not properly reflected in this report.”

The denial of racism comes just eight years after the UK finished forcing taxpayers to pay the descendants of slave owners as a bribe for abolishing slavery nearly two centuries ago.

Meanwhile, officials said they had a “robust” discussion about the report with the UK equalities minister Kemi Badenoch.

As part of its fact-finding mission, the UN working group visited London, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol. It spoke with senior government officials, local city council representatives, Metropolitan police and members of the Human Rights Commission.

The UN working group will present their full findings and recommendations to the UN Human Rights Council in September 2023.

[dutty-lingo]

💥UK failing to address systemic racism against black people, warn UN experts💥

[xtruss]

This historical photograph shows an enslaved African American family or families posing in front of a wooden house on a plantation in Hanover County, Virginia. Photograph By G.H. Houghton, Library of Congress

10 million Enslaved Americans' Names Are Missing From History. AI Is Helping Identify Them.

In addition to AI, the 10 Million Names Project is employing oral histories and archived documents to help identify 10 million enslaved people in pre- and post-colonial America.

— By Rachel Jones | August 31, 2023

When journalist Dorothy Tucker first learned about the 10 Million Names genealogical project, it helped amplify memories of long car journeys from Chicago to “Down South” in the 1960’s, where her mother’s family owned land.

The Mississippi property purchased by her great-grandfather George Trice in 1881 was special for several reasons. First, nobody’s really sure how a formerly enslaved man was able to purchase 160 acres, but Trice came up with the $800. And every time Tucker and her family drove down to Shannon, Mississippi each summer to visit relatives, it was more than just a vacation.

“I'd wake up in the morning and have breakfast at my aunt's house. I'd go a few feet down the road and have lunch at my great-aunt's house. And then I'd play outside at my cousin's house,” says Tucker, an award-winning investigative journalist with CBS2 WBBM-TV in Chicago. “It was that way all day long. Every house was owned by a relative. I thought everybody lived like this. I thought everybody had land and stuff that was theirs.”

Tucker finally got specific details about how and why that land was purchased during the final months of her term as president of the National Association of Black Journalists. In early 2023, NABJ Board Member Paula Madison, a retired NBC Universal executive, informed the group about an offshoot of the Georgetown Memory Project, the initiative that unearthed information about the 1838 sale of enslaved Africans to fund Georgetown University. The 10 Million Names Project was created to recover the names of an estimated 10 million men, women and children of African descent who were enslaved in pre- and post-colonial America between the 1500’s and 1865. By engaging with expert genealogists, cultural organizations, and family historians both Black and white, the initiative hopes to provide more African Americans with information that only formally began to be captured for their ancestors in the 1870 United States Census.

Up until that year, enslaved Africans and their descendants were only acknowledged as the property of their owners. If their existence was noted, it was in the form of sales documents or as catalogued property in civil records. Also, the relatives of enslavers often maintain troves of information about those purchased and sold off that would otherwise be completely lost.

Much of the work will be dependent on oral histories passed down thru generations of families, and researchers of the 10 Million Names Project also hope that more white families will aid in the search by making familial records, like letters and pages from family bibles, available to them.

Tucker, who ended her term as NABJ president during that organization’s annual conference in August, revealed at the awards banquet in Birmingham, Alabama that she’d been able to learn more about her great grandfather’s real-estate ventures, through a collaboration between NABJ and the New England Historical Genealogical Society’s American Ancestors initiative.

The 10 Million Names Project was formally launched at the convention. Tucker considers it an especially timely parting gift to her journalistic colleagues. As societal divisions along racial lines widen, hate crimes continue, and attempts to ban books and curtail African American studies programs in schools and universities increase, strengthening historical knowledge is urgently important for Black Americans, Tucker says.

“I think that the ability to tell these stories and to know them is so critically important,” she says. “When you know your personal story, then as a journalist, it gives you the perspective to dig deeper when you're doing the next story, whether it’s about the school board or about Ukraine or the next elections. You know, these stories are all tools that are really good for all of us.”

How the Initiative Evolved

The man who is the catalyst for the Georgetown Memory Project and 10 Million Names says he’s never really been interested in investigating his own family tree.

“To me, genealogy was sort of like butterfly collecting,” says Richard Cellini, a faculty fellow at Harvard University and founding director of the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Remembrance Program. “It’s impressive because of the amount of effort invested into it. But I never quite understood the point.”

Cellini was born in 1963 in Central Pennsylvania to a Penn State University professor and homemaker mother. His Catholic upbringing steered him to Georgetown University and an eventual decade-long law career before pivoting toward the software and technology realm. In 2015, Cellini learned that his alma mater had formed a working group to explore the sale of 272 men, woman, and children in 1838 to rescue the university from bankruptcy. As a white American of European descent, he says he did not live with or know many Black people growing up, going to school or during his legal and technology careers, so the initiative opened a window in his mind.

When Georgetown President John DeGioia invited alumni to weigh in, Cellini wrote an email asking one simple question that had nothing to do with the university. He wanted to know, “What happened to the people?”

Cellini says a senior member of the working group wrote back to say that research had concluded that all of the enslaved men, women, and children had died fairly quickly after arriving in the swamps of Louisiana where they had been transported.

“And I remember just staring at that email, even though I didn't really know much about the history of slavery or African American history, and just thinking that just doesn't make any sense,” Cellini says. Curiosity drove him to form an independent research group, funded initially through his own credit card and then from other Georgetown alumni who eagerly offered financial backing. To date, the Georgetown Memory Project has fully identified 236 of the 272 enslaved people sold by the university's leaders. Of those identified through archival records, the project has verified more than 10,000 of their direct descendants.

“The 1838 slave sale at Georgetown brought home to me, again, they were real people with real families and real names,” Cellini says. “More than 50 percent of them were children. William was the youngest, and he was six months old. And Daniel was the oldest at 80. Len was sickly, and Stephen was lame. I mean, this is all from the original documentation. From that moment on, I just couldn't get it out of my head.”

The Gathering of History

The genealogists and historians connected with the project suggest that the richest vein of information may well be in the oral histories they’ve already begun gathering through hundreds of interviews. They contain fascinating stories like the ones that Kendra Field’s grandmother Odevia Brown used to tell about her African American and Native American forebears in Oklahoma. When Field was in high school, she never really liked history classes, but she always loved her grandmother’s stories.

“It wasn't until I got to college that I realized, thanks to a wonderful professor, that my grandmother's stories were history,” Field says. After the death of her father, Field began to travel back to those historically Black Oklahoma towns to explore her African American and Creek Indian heritage. Now in her career as a historian, author and professor at Tufts University, Field also has taken on the role of chief historian for 10 Million Names.

Technology, including the use of artificial intelligence programs, is allowing project investigators to do quicker, more efficient searches for information. Field says that can happen by identifying the location of plantation ledgers, advertisements, and receipts from auctions. “Particularly, there's been a lot of advancements made in optical character recognition, which allows researchers to identify names and handwritten records,” Field says.

Prior to this, a researcher had to find the document, transcribe the information, and then pivot to another database to go deeper. But with the development of other genealogical data sets such as Enslaved.org, locating individuals and making connections becomes much easier. “So that means we can move closer to that 10 million much more quickly than we would have been able to even a decade ago,” Field says. Also, the collection at the Library of Congress, “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938” has yielded important clues from the estimated 2,300 people interviewed during that project.

Though identifying 10 million people who were never meant to be known as human beings may sound like a staggering task, the people behind the initiative believe it’s a totally attainable goal—even amidst all the current cultural and ideological turmoil in American society. That’s because, Cellini says, there are certain inalienable truths in this world.

“John Adams said that facts are stubborn things. You know, our Black brothers and sisters have always known their history and white people have always tried to prevent Black people from learning that history. What's new here is that white people are now trying to prevent other white people from learning this history.”

Cellini believes that Black Americans aren’t the only ones who want or need to know the full story. “It's white people who hunger for knowledge of that history, as well. It’s our duty to engage in determined resistance, to strike repeated blows for the truth. And nothing is more stubborn than facts.”

And like journalist Tucker, Cellini believes the search is infinitely for the benefit of the whole of society.

“The hard part isn't the finding,” Cellini says of the effort. “The hard part is the looking. But when we look, we find. And when we find, the whole world changes.”

[islamforalloftheworld]

Thousands defy bans in France to rally against police violence. French police have come under renewed scrutiny following the June 27 shooting of a teenager of Arab descent. Thousands of French protesters have defied a ban to march in central Paris against police violence, a week after riots sparked by the killing of a teenager in a Parisian suburb broke out. Police dispersed the 2,000 protesters from Paris’s huge Place de la Republique on Saturday, sending several hundred people towards the wide Boulevard Magenta where they were seen marching peacefully. Two people were arrested, the Paris police department said after the demonstration. It said it had banned the planned demonstration due to a “context of tensions”. Protesters called the ban “shocking”. “We still enjoy freedom of expression in France but freedom of assembly, in particular, is under threat”, said Felix Bouvarel, a health worker who came to the gathering in spite of the ban. Masked protesters walk amid tear gas during clashes at a march in tribute to Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager killed by a French police officer during a traffic stop, in Nanterre, Paris suburb, France, June 29, 2023. Masked protesters walk amid tear gas during clashes in a Paris suburb About 30 demonstrations against police violence also took place across France, including in the southern port city of Marseille and Strasbourg in the east. The rallies came a week after the country was rocked by riots sparked by the killing of Nahel M at a traffic stop in the Nanterre suburb of the French capital. The 17-year-old of Algerian and Moroccan origin was driving a sports car without a licence. A police officer is under investigation for voluntary homicide; his lawyer says he did not intend to kill the teen. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said this week that more than 3,000 people, mostly teenagers, had been arrested in six nights of riots that ended a week ago. Some 2,500 buildings were damaged. The protests were called by the family of Adama Traore, a Black Frenchman who died in police custody in 2016 in circumstances similar to the killing of George Floyd in the United States. In a video posted on Twitter, Assa Traore, Adama’s older sister, denounced the police ban. “The government has decided to add fuel to the fire” and “not to respect the death of my little brother”, she said. Assa Traore, who attended the rally at the Place de la Republique, said she took part in the gathering to tell “the whole world that our dead have the right to exist, even in death”. “We are marching for the youth to denounce police violence. They want to hide our deaths,” she said at the rally, which was also attended by several legislators. “They authorize marches by neo-Nazis but they don’t allow us to march. France cannot give us moral lessons. Its police is racist and violent,” she added. Since the shooting, rights groups have also called on the police to address allegations of racial profiling and questions over recruitment and training. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) – a body of 18 independent experts – on Friday asked France to pass legislation defining and banning racial profiling and questioned “excessive use of force by law enforcement”. The CERD said it was concerned by “the persistent practice of racial profiling combined with the excessive use of force in the application of the law, in particular by the police, against members of minority groups, notably people of African and Arab origin”. But politicians, including President Emmanuel Macron and the French authorities, have denied institutional racism within the country’s law enforcement agencies. France’s foreign ministryrivals. Campaign groups say Saturday’s “citizens marches” will be an opportunity for people to express their “grief and anger” at discriminatory police policies, especially in working-class neighbourhoods. SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES SOURCE- AL-JAZEERA

[jhamazamnews-blog]

Black people in UK 'living in fear' over racism, say UN experts | UK News

Black people in the UK are “living in fear” due to structural, institutional and systemic racism, according to a United Nations working group. The experts, who spent 10 days travelling across the UK, warned that people of African descent continue to encounter racial discrimination and erosion of their fundamental rights. It also highlighted “trauma” felt by people who are suffering racial…

[newsgola]

UN human rights experts — Global Issues

“We have serious concerns about impunity and the failure to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, deaths in police custody, ‘joint enterprise’ convictions, and the dehumanising nature”, of the so-called ‘stop and search’ policing strategy, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said in a statement at the end of an official visit to the UK. ‘Will this…

[cryptosecrets]

UN human rights experts — Global Issues

“We have serious concerns about impunity and the failure to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, deaths in police custody, ‘joint enterprise’ convictions, and the dehumanising nature”, of the so-called ‘stop and search’ policing strategy, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said in a statement at the end of an official visit to the UK. ‘Will this…

[gamegill]

UN human rights experts — Global Issues

“We have serious concerns about impunity and the failure to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system, deaths in police custody, ‘joint enterprise’ convictions, and the dehumanising nature”, of the so-called ‘stop and search’ policing strategy, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said in a statement at the end of an official visit to the UK. ‘Will this…

[africandescentday]

1st Meeting, 32nd session of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

32nd session of the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent.

Item 1: Opening of the session

Item 2: Election of the Chairperson. Statement by Outgoing Chairperson.

Item 3: Adoption of the agenda

Item 4: Organization of work

Item 5: Update and briefings by the Working Group

Related Sites and Documents

[ausetkmt]

The Guardian: Melilla border crush: Amnesty criticises ‘unlawful force’ and lack of first aid

The Guardian: Melilla border crush: Amnesty criticises ‘unlawful force’ and lack of first aid.

The “widespread use of unlawful force” by Moroccan and Spanish authorities contributed to the deaths of at least 37 people who perished during a mass storming of the border fence between Morocco and Spain’s north African enclave of Melilla in June, according to a report.

The Amnesty International report also accuses Moroccan and Spanish police of failing to provide even basic first aid to those injured in the crush as they were left “in the full glare of the sun for up to eight hours”. It says Moroccan authorities prioritised moving corpses and treating security officials above the needs of injured migrants and refugees.

“The Spanish police did not permit the Red Cross to access the area and there was no public health response at the scene attending to injured people neither during the attempted border crossing and police operation, nor in their aftermath,” says the report.

“Spanish authorities did not assist in any way the injured people who were left on the ground in Spanish territory after the police operation ended, violating their rights in multiple ways including their right to prompt and adequate healthcare and to be free from torture and other ill-treatment.”

Amnesty says the failure to provide assistance was not only cruel but also shows that Spain and Morocco were in breach of their obligations to protect the right to life.

Spain has said there were no deaths in its territory and that Guardia Civil officers acted “totally within the law and with the necessary proportionality required by events”. But it has confirmed that officers used 86 teargas canisters, 28 smoke canisters, 65 rubber bullets, 270 warning shots and 41 doses of pepper spray to try to push back crowds.

Morocco claims its officers acted “with a high level of control and professionalism”, and has said some of those who rushed the fence were armed with sticks, machetes, stones and knives.

The NGO’s researchers – who interviewed survivors, witnesses, officials and healthcare workers – have concluded that crimes under international law were committed on 24 June and the actions of police from both countries contributed to the deaths of at least 37 people and to injuries to dozens more.

The true death toll, however, could be far higher: 77 people who tried to make the crossing that day remain unaccounted for and their families still have no news of them.

The official version of events has already been challenged in investigations by BBC Africa Eye, Lighthouse Reports, a fact-finding trip by Spanish MPs, and Spain’s public ombudsman.

Amnesty is calling on Spain and Morocco to ensure “independent and impartial investigations” are conducted into the events of 24 June to ensure that those who broke the law face justice.

It also wants inquiries into the lack of medical care, and has urged authorities in the countries to help the families of the missing and the dead by locating and repatriating bodies.

In October, a UN working group of experts on people of African descent said the deaths in Melilla were evidence of the “racialised exclusion and deadly violence deployed to keep out people of African and Middle Eastern descent”. The UN committee on migrant workers also called on Spain and Morocco to carry out thorough investigations into what happened.

In June, Spain’s supreme court confirmed the shelving of an investigation into the deaths of 14 people, who drowned in the sea off Spain’s other north African enclave of Ceuta in 2014 after Guardia Civil officers opened fire with rubber bullets and teargas.

[averycanadianfilm]

A UN body has written to the UK government to express “very extreme concern” about its failure to address “structural, institutional and systemic racism” against people of African descent in Britain.