On November 11, the mother and father of Michael Brown, the man shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August, asked the United Nations to arrest the officer should a Missouri grand jury fail to indict him for the killing.
In an appearance before the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva, Switzerland, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown, Sr. petitioned the global government-in-waiting to arrest officer Darren Wilson and charge him with torture and human rights violations.
“We need the world to know what’s going on in Ferguson and we need justice. We need answers and we need action. And we have to bring it to the U.N. so they can expose it to the rest of the world, what’s going on in small town Ferguson,” said McSpadden during an appearance on CNN.
Although the pair’s testimony to the UN torture committee was not made public, CNN released what it reports is a copy of the prepared statement, which was crafted in such a way as to invite the UN bureaucrats to step into the breach and defend “human rights” should the grand jury investigating the event fail to indict Officer Wilson. The CNN report reads:
The document says Brown’s killing and force used by police officers during protests that followed the killing “represent violations of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”
It requests that the U.N. panel recommend the immediate arrest of Officer Darren Wilson, who killed Brown, as well as an end to “racial profiling and racially-biased police harassment across the jurisdictions surrounding Ferguson.”
Lest there be any readers who misinterpret this story and assume that it is at all aimed at defending the actions of the law enforcement officer charged with the unlawful killing of Brown, it most certainly is not. The New American and this reporter in particular have faithfully chronicled the rise of the militarized police and the abuses of power perpetrated by the same.
Likewise, The New American recognizes that everyone charged with a crime is entitled to the due process of law, a right that has safeguarded the liberty of the accused for over a thousand years.
The point of this article is to reveal the dangerous misunderstanding of Michael Brown’s parents. For some reason, these two people believe that the United Nations possesses some sort of law enforcement authority over Americans.
This assumption, while dangerous, is becoming more and more common. So many Americans and so many more of their elected representatives in Congress and state legislators believe that the international body is responsible for righting wrongs and making up for law enforcement inadequacies.
As The New American’s Alex Newman wrote recently regarding the UN’s reaction to state laws nullifying federal drug laws:
The UN is notorious for authoring and flogging treaties that address everything from free speech to gender equality, but the thing they’re best at is ignoring state sovereignty as it is defined in the Constitution,” observed American attorney Amy Miller at Legal Insurrection. “Their premise is that there exists an international norm that the states are flaunting, and it’s the administration’s job to get those states in line with the prescribed norm.”
The UN’s outlandish and increasingly aggressive efforts to dictate policy in the United States are the real problem here, she continued. “Whether you support legalization or not, this issue is a hill to die on,” Miller concluded. “If it were just about pot, I’d say we should ignore the UN and let voters choose to either welcome or reject their new stoner overlords; but this isn’t just about pot. This is about an international organization attempting to pierce the protection of the Constitution and insert itself into state-level governance.”
“That’s the stuff downfalls are made of,” she added.
John F. McManus, publisher of The New American, put an even finer point on the problem, writing on October 30:
For many years, U.S. leaders have been transferring our nation’s independence to the United Nations. Their goal, and certainly the goal of the UN’s founders and current leaders, is a world government dominating the planet.
If the process continues, nations will continue to exist but only on paper. All power will have been ceded to the “House that Hiss built” (Alger Hiss being the traitorous American correctly cited as the most important founder of the world body).
And:
Like a silent but menacing thief in the night, UN power continues to grow. The only sensible solution to this enormously dangerous situation is for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. The sooner, the better. Let Congress know.
Perhaps if more people appreciated the danger posed by a surrender of sovereignty and the accompanying enslavement that would soon follow such a catastrophe, Congress would be filled with elected representatives who refuse to fund this despotic pack of petty tyrants.
Curiously, the specter of slavery was summoned by Brown’s parents during their audience with the UN torture apparatchiks. In a statement delivered at the Lambert International Airport in St. Louis after returning from Geneva, McSpadden summarized her statement to the UN.
“We were able to let the United Nations know that in the United States we were being treated unfairly and just basically expose that something should be done because this is not a year or two years, this is hundreds of years,” McSpadden said. “I hate what happened to my son but it must stop with my son.”
Again, the enslavement of one human being by another is deplorable, despicable, and indefensible. The fact that such a practice plagued the United States is an embarrassment and one for which there is no justification. As George Mason explained during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 during debates on the future of slavery under the proposed constitution: “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not [sic] be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.”
If Michael Brown’s parents believe that the would-be masters in Geneva or Turtle Bay would be any less ruthless than those that once lorded over southern plantations then that mistake is greater than the one that motivated their trip to Switzerland in the first place.
Consider this report by Alex Newman on the make-up of the UN Human Rights Council:
Among the mass-murdering regimes selected to sit on the UN’s self-styled “human rights” entity were the brutal communist dictatorships enslaving the people of China, Cuba, and Vietnam, along with the hardline Islamic tyrants ruling over Algeria and Saudi Arabia. Of course, numerous critics have pointed out that those are some of the most repressive tyrannies on earth. Vladimir Putin’s Russian government, widely criticized as a gangster regime, was also chosen to sit on the global body supposedly charged with upholding “human rights” around the world. Other brutal autocrats were already on the council prior to the most recent additions.
These inconvenient truths make it evident that if Michael Brown’s parents truly treasure freedom and wish to see slavery abolished permanently, then the last place they should pray for relief is from the United Nations.
The grand jury’s decision on whether to indict Darren Wilson on charges of unlawfully killing Michael Brown is expected by the end of the month.
Photo of Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown, Sr.: AP Images
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton.
