March, 07 2011, 08:39am EDT

Civil and Human Rights Groups Ask for Further U.N. Involvement to End Racial Discrimination in U.S.
U.S. Should Take Concrete Steps to Comply With Human Rights Obligations
NEW YORK
The American Civil Liberties Union joined a coalition of civil and human rights groups in sending a letter today to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, asking the committee to urge the United States government to comply with its obligations under international human rights laws and treaties regarding racial discrimination.
While the committee and other U.N. human rights experts have provided specific and detailed recommendations over the last three years advising the U.S. government of the need to address ongoing issues of racial discrimination through domestic implementation of human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), the Obama administration has yet to take concrete measures to fully implement the ICERD and other related human rights obligations. The U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is the principle global body monitoring countries compliance with ICERD, which the U.S. ratified in 1994.
The letter asked the committee to urge the U.S. government to adopt a national plan of action for ICERD implementation, with full and meaningful consultation with civil society and affected communities and in collaboration with local and state governments.
According to the letter, "People of African descent in the United States continue to face intentional, structural, and de facto forms of discrimination which manifest in unequal access to quality education, housing, health services, employment, electoral disfranchisement and discrimination in the criminal justice system, among many other issues."
The full text of the letter follows and is available online at: www.aclu.org/human-rights-racial-justice/coalition-letter-cerd-committee
March 7, 2011
Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
78th Session, 14th of February-11th of March, 2011
Geneva
Re: Thematic Discussion in the Context of the International Year for People of African Descent
Dear Members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination:
The undersigned groups represent major civil and human rights organizations in the United States dedicated to the eradication of racial discrimination against people of African descent and other racial and ethnic minorities. People of African descent in the United States continue to face intentional, structural, and de facto forms of discrimination which manifest in unequal access to quality education, housing, health services, employment, electoral disfranchisement and discrimination in the criminal justice system, among many other issues. In the context of the International Year for People of African Descent,[1] we write to discuss the status of U.S. implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).
As discussed below, in the past few years, the Committee and other U.N. human rights experts have provided specific and detailed recommendations advising the United States government of the need to address ongoing issues of racial discrimination through domestic implementation of human rights obligations, especially ICERD. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has yet to take concrete measures to fully implement the ICERD and other related human rights obligations, notwithstanding the administration's welcomed policy of reengagement on international human rights.
Specifically, we would like to call the Committee's attention to the lack of any progress to develop a specific plan of action based upon the Concluding Observations and Recommendations of the Committee to the United States in March of 2008. We strongly believe that without a comprehensive national plan of action to implement ICERD, we fear that at the time of the next reporting deadline and constructive dialogue (currently scheduled for Spring 2012), the U.S. government will have little progress to show regarding domestic human rights implementation.
Among other things, the Committee recommended that the United States take the following actions:[2]
1) "...establish appropriate mechanisms to ensure a coordinated approach towards the implementation of the Convention at the federal, state and local levels,"[3] and
2) "...take all necessary steps to guarantee the right of everyone to equal treatment before tribunals and all other organs administering justice, including further studies to determine the nature and scope of the problem, and the implementation of national strategies or plans of action aimed at the elimination of structural racial discrimination."[4]
The Committee's detailed recommendations were followed by additional documentation completed by United Nations independent experts as part of official fact finding missions to the United States in 2008 and 2010. In his 2009 report to the Human Rights Council (HRC), the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance noted the ongoing challenges that exist in the United States. He recommended that the U.S "reassess existing legislation in view of two main guidelines: addressing the overlapping nature of poverty and race or ethnicity; and linking the fight against racism to the construction of a democratic, egalitarian and interactive multiculturalism, in order to strengthen inter-community relations."[5]
Last year, the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent noted in a report submitted to the HRC on their visit to the United States "the ongoing structural discrimination that cannot be effectively addressed with the existing legal mechanisms and legislation[.]" and added that "there is no specific anti-discrimination act that would serve to guide the drafting and implementation of relevant federal, state and local laws."[6]
While this Administration has shown its support for federal civil rights legislation and administrative action and signaled its commitment to domestic human rights issues generally, as mentioned above, the United States has still not yet adopted a national plan of action for implementation of the 2008 ICERD Recommendations; nor has the United States developed the interagency task force that would enable the development and implementation of a plan of action throughout the Executive Branch and in coordination with state and local governments. This lack of progress is disappointing and calls for further action from the Committee.
We commend the Committee for its longstanding work and fight against racial discrimination worldwide and especially its commitment to the promotion and protection of the rights of people of African descent. Moreover, we hope that the thematic discussion will lead to greater commitment and action by all countries, including the U.S. government, to translate their commitment to end racial discrimination into concrete laws and policies through a national plan of action for ICERD implementation with full and meaningful consultation with civil society and affected communities and collaboration with local and state governments.
We welcome the opportunity to assist the Committee in encouraging the U.S. government to fully comply with its obligations under the ICERD and we thank the Committee for all of its consideration in regards to this matter.
Sincerely,
American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International USA
Asian American Justice Center
Center for Constitutional Rights
Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute
Human Rights at Home Campaign
Human Rights Watch
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights
National Coalition-Black Women's Roundtable
National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
Poverty & Race Research Action Council
Rights Working Group
Urban Justice Center
U.S. Human Rights Network
World Organization for Human Rights USA
[1] UN Resolution A/RES/64/169.
[2] In January 2009, the United States responded to the Committee's recommendations contained in its Concluding Observations and submitted additional information to the Committee. On September 28, 2009 the Committee sent a letter to the United States acknowledging receipt of additional information and offering to assist the United States in its efforts to ensure the effective implementation of the Convention
[3] CERD/C/USA/CO/6, para. 13.
[4] CERD/C/USA/CO/6, para. 20.
[5] Report of U.N. Special Rapporteur Doudou Diene, Human Rights Council, 11th Sess., Agenda Item 9, at 27 P 98, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/11/36/Add3 (2009), available at https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/11session/A.HRC.11....
[6] Report of U.N. Work Group of Experts on People of African Descent, Human Rights Council, 15th Sess., Agenda Item 9, at 19 P 81, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/15/18 (2010), available at https://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/racism/groups/african/docs/A-HRC-....
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
At Least 95 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks Including Massacres at Beach Café, Aid Points
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
Jun 30, 2025
Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
Medical sources said at least 33 civilians were killed and nearly 50 others wounded in the massacre, including footballer Mustafa Abu Amira, photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab—who survived an earlier Israeli airstrike and is reportedly the 227th journalists killed by Israel since October 2023—and prominent artist Frans Al-Salmi, whose final painting depicting a young Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces resembles photographs of its slain creator posted on social media after her killing.
Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," he said. "It was a scene that made your skin crawl."
Witnesses and officials said Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking food and other humanitarian aid from a U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution point in southern Gaza, killing 15 people amid near-daily massacres of aid-seekers.
"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'We Cannot Be Silent': Tlaib Leads 19 US Lawmakers Demanding Israel Stop Starving Gaza
"This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help."
Jun 30, 2025
As the death toll from Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians continues to rise amid the ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege of the Gaza Strip, Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led 18 congressional colleagues in a letter demanding that the Trump administration push for an immediate cease-fire, an end to the Israeli blockade, and a resumption of humanitarian aid into the embattled coastal enclave.
"We are outraged at the weaponization of humanitarian aid and escalating use of starvation as a weapon of war by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza," Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—and the other lawmakers wrote in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "For over three months, Israeli authorities have blocked nearly all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, fueling mass starvation and suffering among over 2 million people. This follows over 600 days of bombardment, destruction, and forced displacement, and nearly two decades of siege."
"According to experts, 100% of the population is now at risk of famine, and nearly half a million civilians, most of them children, are facing 'catastrophic' conditions of 'starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels,'" the legislators noted. "These actions are a direct violation of both U.S. and international humanitarian law, with devastating human consequences."
Gaza officials have reported that hundreds of Palestinians—including at least 66 children—have died in Gaza from malnutrition and lack of medicine since Israel ratcheted up its siege in early March. Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund warned that childhood malnutrition was "rising at an alarming rate," with 5,119 children under the age of 5 treated for the life-threatening condition in May alone. Of those treated children, 636 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of the condition.
Meanwhile, nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 others have been injured as Israeli occupation forces carry out near-daily massacres of desperate people seeking food and other humanitarian aid at or near distribution sites run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israel Defense Forces officers and troops have said that they were ordered to shoot and shell aid-seeking Gazans, even when they posed no threat.
"This is not aid," the lawmakers' letter argues. "UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has warned that, under the GHF, 'aid distribution has become a death trap.' We cannot allow this to continue."
"We strongly oppose any efforts to dismantle the existing U.N.-led humanitarian coordination system in Gaza, which is ready to resume operations immediately once the blockade is lifted," the legislators wrote. "Replacing this system with the GHF further restricts lifesaving aid and undermines the work of long-standing, trusted humanitarian organizations. The result of this policy will be continued starvation and famine."
"We cannot be silent. This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help," the lawmakers added. "We demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza, the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting cease-fire. Any other path forward is a path toward greater hunger, famine, and death."
Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated a call for a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining 22 living Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas.
In addition to Tlaib, the letter to Rubio was signed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Henry "Hank"Johnson (Ga.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Paul Tonko (N.Y.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden National Security Adviser Among Those Crafting 'Project 2029' Policy Agenda for Democrats
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
Jun 30, 2025
Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
As The New York Times noted in its reporting on Project 2029, the panel is being convened amid extensive infighting regarding how the Democratic Party can win back control of the White House and Congress.
After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
Project 2029's inclusion of strategists like Kessler, who declared economic populism "a dead end for Democrats" in 2013, demonstrates "the whole problem [with Democratic leadership] in a nutshell," said Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass—as does Sullivan's seat on the advisory board.
As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Sullivan played a key role in the administration's defense and funding of Israel's assault on Gaza, which international experts and human rights groups have said is a genocide.
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
"Jake Sullivan is shaping domestic policy for the next Democratic administration," he added. "Who is happy with the Biden foreign policy legacy?"
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular