United Nations: People in the US, especially the black community, have good reason to be angry and frustrated as old philosophies of “exclusion” and “discrimination” have reborn and are cloaked in new and euphemistic terms, a UN human rights expert has said.
Terming the US as a “nation of struggle and resilience”, Maina Kiai, the Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, said anger of the country’s black community was “justifiable”.
“People have good reason to be angry and frustrated at the moment,” Kiai said at the end of his first official fact-finding mission to the country.
“And it is at times like these when robust promotion of assembly and association rights are needed most. These rights give people a peaceful avenue to speak out, engage in dialogue with their fellow citizens and authorities, air their grievances and hopefully settle them,” he said.
Kiai noted that understanding racism meant looking back at 400 years of slavery and post-civil war laws, which “enforced segregation and marginalised the African-American community to a life of misery, poverty and persecution.”
He singled out race as a particularly pernicious issue, emphasising that while his mandate does not cover racial discrimination, it was impossible to carry out his mission “without issues of racism pervading the discussions.”
Kiai said that in more recent times “old philosophies of exclusion and discrimination were reborn, cloaked in new and euphemistic terms,” such as the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ and “three strikes” sentencing policies.
The effects of harsh law-and-order policies often snowball, he said, adding that with a minor criminal conviction or even an arrest at a protest without substantiated charges making it difficult to find a job, secure a student loan or find a place to live.
“There is justifiable and palpable anger in the black community over these injustices, which needs to be expressed,” he stressed, explaining that this is the context that gave birth to the non-violent ‘Black Lives Matter’ protest movement.
The situation of migrant workers throughout the US is characterised by the precariousness and exploitation of their employment situation, retaliation for drawing attention to adverse working conditions and a fear of taking action to seek improvement of the violations, he said.
Kiai further noted that the lack of robust labour rights protections as a major hurdle to exercising the right to freedom of association in the workplace, noting that he was “shocked” to see that in states such as Mississippi, the lack of unionisation and ability to exploit workers is touted as a great benefit for employers.
PTI
