George Floyd’s family has appealed to the United Nations to intervene in his case and to send recommendations for systemic police reform in the US, according to a press release.
In a June 3 letter to the UN Working Group on the Rights of People of African Descent, the family and civil rights attorney Ben Crump urged the UN to investigate Floyd’s death and encourage the US government to press federal criminal charges against the officers involved.
They requested reforms including de-escalating techniques, independent prosecutions and autopsies for every police killing.
Crump said in a statement that the US “has a long pattern and practice of depriving Black citizens of the fundamental human right to life.”
He said he had sought the protection of the federal government on innumerable cases of police brutality against black people — including Martin Lee Anderson in Florida, Michael Brown in Missouri and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky — but that the government had failed to hold officers accountable, even in cases with irrefutable video evidence.
“When a group of people of any nation have been systemically deprived of their universal human right to life by its government for decades, it must appeal to the international community for its support and to the United Nations for its intervention. We echo the words of [Ethiopian] Emperor Haile Selassie I in his 1963 speech to the United Nations in which he pledged to continue to fight for equality and justice, ‘until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned … until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eye,'” said Crump.
International legal strategists and advocates Jotaka Eaddy and Jasmine Rand added:
“The comments made by President Trump on June 1, 2020, wherein he highlighted protecting citizens’ right to bear arms above African Americans’ right to life, heightens the urgency of the appeal to the United Nations, as we believe his comments will incite vigilante behavior and violence against African Americans.”
They said the failure to address police violence had “weaponized racism against African Americans.”
sources CNN