The United Nations special rapporteur on racism offered recommendations for the U.S. to address ongoing issues of discrimination in a presentation before the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) today. At the invitation of the United States government, former special rapporteur Doudou Diene toured the U.S. in May and June 2008 to conduct an analysis of ongoing racism and ethnic discrimination. Today, current special rapporteur Githu Muigai presented Diene’s findings. This is the first session of the UNHRC in which the U.S. is participating as a member.
While in the U.S., the special rapporteur met with representatives of the ACLU and other non-governmental organizations, government officials, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and members of local communities. The resulting report highlights racism in the criminal justice system, the disparity between sentencing for crack and powder cocaine, abuses facing immigrant and African-American workers in the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the overall vulnerability of immigrant workers and the need to meaningfully address the “school-to-prison pipeline.” The report also calls on Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) and create a bipartisan commission to evaluate the on-going fight against racism.
“The special rapporteur’s visits in Los Angeles with Arab, Sikh, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Native American communities, and his review of the ACLU’s recent work on racial profiling at the Los Angeles Police Department, helped to inform his conclusions about the ongoing and urgent need for racial justice reform in this country,” said Catherine Lhamon, Racial Justice Director for the ACLU of Southern California. “We hope the rapporteur’s report will push us locally and as a nation to take concrete steps toward creating meaningful justice for all Americans.”
“Mr. Diene’s report highlights the persistence of racism in the U.S. It focuses on many issues that permeate the lives of so many people who live and work in Florida, including racial profiling, the lack of legal protections for immigrant workers, the housing crisis and homelessness, and the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon,” said Muslima Lewis, Director of the ACLU of Florida’s Racial Justice Project. “We are hopeful that the recommendations in the rapporteur’s report will be the impetus for meaningful and systemic racial justice reform in Miami, Florida and the entire country.”
The report finds that most minority communities are concerned about irregularities in law enforcement related to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. “Interlocutors pointed to an overrepresentation of individuals belonging to racial and ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system. While in mid-2007 black males constituted around 12.5 percent of the population, they comprised 38.9 percent of the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails.21 Black males are therefore 6.5 more likely to be incarcerated than white,
non-Hispanic males. While many civil society organizations agreed that part of the explanation
to these disparities is related to social factors, particularly the overlap of poverty and race, it was
pointed out that racial discrimination also plays a key role in explaining this phenomenon.”
The report identified racial disparities at several stages of law enforcement activities. A
key example is traffic stops. A report by the Department of Justice recently found that whereas
white, black and Hispanic drivers were stopped by the police at similar rates, black and Hispanic
drivers were approximately 2.5 times more likely to be searched; the rate of arrests was two
times higher for blacks and 50 percent higher for Hispanics; blacks were 3.5 times more likely and Hispanics were almost 2 times more likely to experience use of police force.”
Another example concerns sentencing outcomes. “A majority of studies show evidence of racially
discriminatory sentencing; in particular, that individuals belonging to minorities tend to be
disadvantaged in terms of the decision to incarcerate or not and in receiving harsher sentences
than white individuals with comparable social and economic status.”
Civil society also pointed to evidences of racial bias in the application of the death penalty. “In 2005, African Americans comprised nearly 42 percent of the number of death row inmates but
only around 12 percent of the general population,” according to the report.