Repetition is the mother of all learning. This year, when it comes to criticism of its human rights record, the United States has heard its fair share of repetition.
Recently, nearly identical statements of concern have come from three separate United Nations committees overseeing core human right treaties to which the U.S. is party — the Convention Against Torture, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
In April, long before the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the Human Rights Committee, reviewing U.S. compliance with the ICCPR, called on the US government to "step up its efforts to prevent the excessive use of force by law enforcement officers." The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination followed suit in August, raising its concern over the "brutality and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against members of racial and ethnic minorities" in the United States, a view shared by the Committee Against Torture, which last month expressed "deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals."
It's not that the committees, made up of independent experts from around the globe, singled the United States out for criticism; they are charged with periodically assessing how well all the countries (a vast majority of U.N. members) that are party to these treaties are living up to the obligations they entail. But, unusually, all three committees reviewed U.S. treaty compliance in the span of a single year, with the effect that their unsparing assessments, published as "concluding observations," gained added rhetorical force.
Some of these observations were predictable, squarely in each committee's wheelhouse. The Committee Against Torture lambasted the U.S. for the use of torture against detainees in U.S. custody during the George W. Bush administration and for the lack of accountability or redress to victims for the abuses. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination raised the issue of inadequate access to quality education for minority students. The Human Rights Committee critiqued the U.S. embrace of mass surveillance. But what was striking was the fact that despite their very different themes of inquiry, all three independent bodies found it necessary, in many cases, to raise precisely the same human rights concerns in their separate reviews.
For example, each of the committees raised problems with U.S. immigration enforcement, particularly the arbitrary manner by which the United States decides who to detain and who to deport, failing to take into account individual considerations. The Human Rights Committee stated its concern with "the mandatory nature of the deportation of foreigners, without regard to elements such as the seriousness of crimes and misdemeanors committed, the length of lawful stay in the United States, health status, family ties and the fate of spouses and children staying behind, or the humanitarian situation in the country of destination." The Committee Against Torture noted its own concern with the failure of asylum screening processes at the border and the recent, rapid increase in U.S. family immigration detention.
All three committees also called for the total abolition of life sentences without the possibility of parole for child offenders, including for those already sentenced ("irrespective of the crime committed" according to the Committee Against Torture). This may not be as much of a surprise, considering that of the U.N.'s 192 member countries, only in the United States are these sentences imposed. Each committee was further troubled by the U.S. juvenile justice system in general, the Committee Against Torture raising how children are confined in adult jails and prisons and often in solitary confinement.
Concerns around racial profiling by law enforcement, including the surveillance of Muslims, echoed across all three reviews. All three also raised questions about the use of lethal injections, concerned with botched executions and the imposition of capital punishment disproportionately on African-Americans.
The United States is supposed to address each of the concerns raised in preparation for the next reviews, which should happen in approximately four years. Each committee highlights these improvements as well in their concluding observations — for example, the Committee Against Torture was able to note some improvements in U.S. practices since their last review in 2006. Still, in 2006 that same committee was "concerned about reports of brutality and use of excessive force by the State party’s law-enforcement personnel, and the numerous allegations of their ill-treatment of vulnerable groups, in particular racial minorities." Eight years later, they had to repeat themselves.
Enough with the repetition. The United States should move on to the learning.
Ginatta is the advocacy director for the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch.