ATLANTA, GA - February 4 - On February 21 and 22 representatives of the U.S. State Department and the Department of Justice will defend the Bush Administration’s human rights record. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination will examine U.S. compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). As an international treaty that the US is a party to, the ICERD has the force of law in the United States. This marks only the second time since the U.S. approved the treaty in 1994 that it has produced a report and subjected its domestic record on human rights and race to review. The U.S. report, which was quietly released in April of 2007, precipitated a torrent of criticism and outrage from organizations, including many associated with the US Human Rights Network (USHRN), a coalition of over 250 social justice and human rights groups across the country. The Network, which produced its own “shadow” report, a document that is part of the official record of the proceeding , charges the Bush Administration not only with failing to comply with its obligations under a treaty that carries the force of law in the United States, but also with whitewashing the reality of racial inequality in America.

• The U.S. government's report does not mention the internationally recognized race and poverty related impacts of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
  
• The report completely ignores the issue of policy brutality, recognized by many Americans as one of the most blatant and common forms of ongoing differential treatment based on race.
  
• The report does not discuss the well documented “school to prison pipeline,” in which discriminatorily applied “zero tolerance” policies and criminal justice based responses to overcrowding and under resourcing of public schools drive children of color out of schools and into the prison system
  
• Required to provide information about compliance with the Convention at the State level, the government only chose to provide comprehensive information on four states: Oregon, South Carolina, Illinois and New Mexico, notably overlooking States with some of the country's largest populations of people of color and immigrants, such as New York, California, Texas and Florida, as well as the Gulf Coast States victimized by Katrina.
  
• The government's report suggests that stark racial disparities in incarceration rates (African Americans and Latino/as make up 60% of the over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States, but less than a quarter of the population) may be “related to differential involvement in crime” rather than a result of the cumulative impacts of racial disparities in the treatment of minorities at every stage of the criminal justice process. Adding insult to injury, the U.S. report fails to cite evidence that rates of involvement in many criminalized activities, including drug use, are actually very similar across race.
  
• The report highlights training and outreach programs for law enforcement agencies encouraging sensitivity to Arab and Muslim communities developed in the aftermath of 9/11, while completely failing to acknowledge widespread racially and ethnically targeted law enforcement practices such as the special registration program and aggressive round-ups and interviews of thousands of non-citizen Muslims, Arabs and South Asians.
  
• Indigenous people continue to suffer profound and ongoing effects of the legacy of colonialism and racial discrimination in the U.S.

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