Human Rights Day| UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on discrimination and intolerance
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay writes in UN Dispatch, on the occasion of Human Rights Day, 9 December 2009:
Old and new forms of discrimination and intolerance continue to divide communities all over the world. Sentiments of xenophobia are on the rise. They are often manipulated for demagogic purposes or even for sinister political agendas. Day after day, their corrosive effects undermine the rights of countless victims. This is why today on Human Rights Day, the United Nations is urging everyone everywhere in the world to embrace diversity and end discrimination. [...] Read more
Human Rights Council: Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Finds Progress Lacking and Calls For Legislation
An independent group of 18 human rights experts, the Human Rights Council Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) oversees compliance with the CERD treaty. In March last year, the committee strongly criticized the U.S. record on racial discrimination and recommendations for U.S. compliance. The report to the committee by the Bush administration, submitted in January, was criticized by a number of human rights groups as being a last-minute whitewash report with numerous ommissions, according to the Amercian Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). From an ACLU press release on the CERD’s recent review of the U.S.: NEW YORK – In a letter to the Obama administration made public by the American Civil Liberties Union today, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concerns over a lack of progress to end racial discrimination in the United States. The letter urged the Obama administration and Congress to do more to end racial profiling, strengthen efforts to provide adequate and affordable housing to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, end the practice of sentencing juveniles – most of whom are persons of color – to life sentences without parole and address the deprivation of Western Shoshone American Indians of their ancestral lands. [...] Read more
